
-QassBXlZKL 

Book. . Q53 3 n 3 

Copyright In , 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



ADVERTISEMENT 

A companion volume by Mr. Short: 

The Deeper Meaning of the "Temperance" Ques- 
tion: 

SERMONS DELIVERED IN CENTRAL CHURCH, 
SIOUX CITY, IOWA. 

Cloth, 176 pp., by mail 68c 

The price of the present volume is $1.00 per copy, 
net. By mail $1.10; cash with order. Use P. O. 
money order, cash or stamps. Give name and ad- 
dress plainly and put a return address on your order. 
Write to 

The Hyde Park Press, Mail Order Publishers. 

Station E., Kansas City, Mo. 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 






LET THERE BE LIGHT 

A STUDY IN 

FREEDOM AND FAITH 

BEING 

A REVIEW OF SIX YEARS MINISTRY 

IN 

SIOUX CITY, IOWA 

BY 

WALLACE M. SHORT 

MINISTER 
OF CENTRAL CHURCH 



"For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, 
and be not entangled again in a poke of bondage." 

— Galatians 5:1. 

"0, for a layman — who has seen him? — large enough to say 
to his minister at the close of a sermon full of teaching 
which he cannot accept, 'I cannot agree with you now, 
but I thank you for your sermon. It has done me good, 
for it has made me think.' " — Charles E. Jefferson. 



The Hyde Park Press, Mail Order Publishers 

Station £., Kansas City, Missouri. 

1916 



ip° 






&'<& 



'h 



Copyright 19i6 

by 

The Hyde Park Press. 



OCT -2 1916 
©CI.A438697 



DEDICATED 

to those men and women of our country who, 
approaching from many viewpoints, acting 
from varied and often mixed motives, beset by 
misunderstanding and misrepresentation, are 
all at heart battling for the central principle of 
democratic institutions, are contending for 
that which our fathers purchased at great 
price, are defending constitutional government 
from the assaults of its most insidious foes — 
those who in the name of good morals would 
substitute the physical force of man for the 
moral forces of God. A noble company are 
these champions of Freedom and Faith. May 
God arm them with increasing wisdom and 
patience and power. 



Yll 



TO THE READER. 

The chapters of this book were originally 
planned merely to be read to, or by, the mem- 
bers of a COUNCIL of representatives of the 
Congregational denomination to whom I had 
appealed in support of my right to ministerial 
standing and fellowship, of which the Sioux 
Association of Congregational Churches and 
Ministers had proposed to deprive me because 
of my teachings on the temperance question. 

The last chapter of the volume was writ- 
ten in the month of May, and was designed to 
give the proposed Council an illustration of my 
temperance teachings, the chapter being the 
substance of a lecture which I have delivered 
several times during the past year in a number 
of cities. The chapter is printed here just as 
at first written. 

About the first of June it began to appear 
that the calling of the Council was likely to be 
delayed for many months. I therefore de- 
termined to print this volume. 

In the autumn of 1915 I had written a 
paper for use before a committee of the Sioux 
Association which finally met me at Sheldon 
on February 14, 1916, but did not give me op- 
portunity to read my paper. That paper was 
almost wholly re-written during the month of 
June, 1916, and is the first chapter of this book. 
All in this first chapter that tells of mv ex- 



perience with the Sioux City church was added 
at that time. It has been written now for the 
public, as well as for the proposed Council 
when it shall convene. 

The writing of this chapter in June was 
undertaken from a sense of duty imposed upon 
me by influences in Sioux City and the Sioux 
Association over which I had no control. The 
recalling of the experiences given in the chap- 
ter was at first painful indeed. But as I came 
to the task each morning with the prayer — 

"Oh Thou Spirit of Truth, guide me, that 
I may not refrain from recording any- 
thing which the people need to know! 

O Thou Love Eternal, let me record noth- 
ing in a spirit of malice towards any hu- 
man SOUl!" 

I found pain changing into joy, and finally fin- 
ished the work as a labor of love. That per- 
sonal experience has been to me abundant re- 
ward for all that the chapter has cost me. 

The third chapter was written in the 
month of July, and is the real heart of the vol- 
ume. Chapter two bears the date of each part 
in the proper place within the chapter. 

My contention in the book is not that peo- 
ple must believe as I do with reference to the 
true spirit and methods for the advancement 
of temperance. My contention is that the 
spirit of Jesus, the spirit of democracy, and 
the true spirit of mv church denomination all 



agree in standing for liberty of thought and 
freedom of discussion. The spirit that under- 
takes falsely to brand a man by publishing him 
as a moral outcast because he does not bow to 
a present majority in some matter of opinion or 
policy is anti-Christian, undemocratic, and un- 
Congregational. 

I hope it may seem to the reader that God 
has enabled me wholly to lose sight of any 
question of personal self-defense. It has 
seemed to me that I should be false to a trust 
if I should yield in silence to an un-Christian 
and undemocratic and un-Congregational 
spirit and method which I believe has pre- 
vailed in the acts of the Sioux Association in 
my case. 

I have full confidence in the final judg- 
ment of the representatives of the denomina- 
tion. The events of the last few months have 
brought me into a wider acquaintance with our 
representative and acknowledged leaders than 
I have ever before enjoyed. 

I feel that I have come to see with great 
clearness some principles of democracy and 
Christianity that bear upon the question of 
temperance and which are now ignored by the 
majority of the ministers of my denomination. 
I have no desire to force my views upon others ; 
I would not, if I could, use upon them any 
other influence than open and earnest witness 
to the light as each one is given to see the 
light. It was no purpose of mine that brought 
me into prominence in this matter, but rather 



XI 



the assaults of certain forces that would not 
leave me to do my work in peace. 

Frequently it happens that man proposes 
and God disposes. If it be his providential pur- 
pose to use me as a witness to certain neglected 
truths that the people need to heed, I hope wis- 
dom and strength may be given me to do his 
will. 

What a man sees, that he knows, so far 
as it is in the power of man to know anything. 
Every deeper spiritual experience, and every 
closer contact with the deep and eternal prin- 
ciples of man's nature and God's laws and 
methods, makes me know more clearly that the 
temperance question can never be settled by 
the present prevailing methods and spirit. 

I know this in the same way that Jesus 
knew that the children of this age are often 
wiser for their generation than many of those 
who profess to deal with the spiritual forces, 
which require a new and deeper kind of insight. 
I know it in the same way that Paul knew that 
some of the things that men teach as wisdom 
are foolishness with God. I know it in the 
same way as Luther knew that a higher wis- 
dom than man's had spoken to him and he 
could not do otherwise than to take his stand 
by that voice. I know it in the same way that 
Bishop Tuttle knows, when he writes me that 
to try to extirpate intemperance by physical 
instead of by moral force "is to refuse to follow 
the example of the Almighty in dealing with 
evil." 



xii 



The temptation to our frail human nature, 
whenever it can get the power, to use material 
and physical force to accomplish its ends, 
where God's laws have decreed the use of 
moral forces, has, times without number, been 
the cause of the breakdown of civilization and 
the appeal to arms. Thus have been written 
in blood chapter after chapter of the history of 
human progress. Tyranny, which is usually 
the seeking of apparently good ends by phys- 
ical instead of moral forces, has thus received 
its deserved chastisement from age to age, and 
the people, as men of conviction and courage 
have come to the front in times of upheaval, 
have written in lines of fire some further in- 
terpretation of the eternal principles of Free- 
dom and Faith. 

I simply bear my witness, whenever the 
occasion requires it, and go forward to do my 
work. 

To those who by reading and criticising 
the manuscript pages have greatly assisted me 
— ministers, lawyers, home makers, business 
men — I desire to express here my sincere and 
grateful appreciation. 

Wallace M. Short. 

Sioux City, Iowa, 

August i, 19 1 6. 



Xlll 



CONTENTS. 

Page. 

Dedicated - - - - - vii 

To the Reader - ix 

i. A Thread oe History i 

2. Correspondence - - - - 39 

3. God Our Savior ---".- 75 

4. Temperance and American Ideals — Based on 

the Teachings of Abraham Lincoln - - 110 



XV 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

As a boy I was brought up to the idea that 
the temperance question was a matter chiefly 
for the political and the police powers — I was 
a prohibitionist. Gradually, during my college 
and seminary days, and during the first ten 
or twelve years of my ministry, I found my- 
self changing from this opinion toward the 
conviction that temperance is chiefly a matter 
of moral and spiritual power, to be inculcated 
primarily through the homes, schools, churches 
and the influence of the Christian ministry. 

As I look back now from my present 
viewpoint, I see that this change of mind be- 
gan almost imperceptibly in my college days. 
During the five years of preparatory school 
and college I was associated most closely with 
an honored and beloved teacher who had 
grown up in Maine and was deeply imbued 
with the legalistic attitude of mind in his ef- 
forts to promote temperance. Year by year 
I felt a growing sense of the potency of the in- 
spirational elements in this man — the influ- 
ences that worked along the lines of freedom 
and faith. At the same time my interest in his 
prohibition efforts steadily declined. I did not 
come then to the point of actually condemning 
his prohibition activities, but I did come to the 
point of saying to myself, that I should never 
allow myself to become entrapped by such ef- 



2 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

forts, which seemed to me to consume the 
man's strength, and with little result, while 
preventing the full exercise of the greater in- 
fluences of fellowship and inspiration and 
faith. This man seemed to me to be capable 
of being a Thomas Arnold, had he not been 
burdened with the weight of a prohibition em- 
phasis that kept him down. 

My first pastorate was in Evansville, 
Wis., a town of less than two thousand in- 
habitants. Here I remained for seven years. 
It was a town which boasted that it had never 
from the first permitted the sale of alcoholic 
beverages. During this pastorate I was not 
conscious of actual objection to prohibition 
methods, though I see plainly now that I was 
moving steadily toward the time when I 
should place the emphasis upon other and 
higher methods. 

When I began my ministry in this first 
pastorate, I wrote for myself, and placed above 
my study desk, this motto, "BYing to light al- 
ways the great principles of the moral and 
spiritual life." I intended this motto as a con- 
stant warning against making my ministry 
merely a shallow iteration of a few obvious 
bits of advice touching the habits and prac- 
tices that lie most visible to the eyes of men. 
The vision of this high purpose in the ministry 
of Jesus Christ has grown upon me with each 
passing year, and with this growth it has be- 
come less and less possible for me to yield my 
allegiance to the methods that work almost 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 3 

wholly by political and police influences — by 
physical rather than moral forces. 

Once during this pastorate there was a 
license campaign in the town. The churches 
held a union prohibition rally on a Sunday 
evening in the opera house, and I was one of 
the speakers. I did the best I could, but be- 
came painfully conscious that my heart was 
in other and higher methods. I had discov- 
ered that indifferent, unspiritual and immoral 
lives were as frequent there as elsewhere. I had 
learned that righteousness, temperance and 
judgment are positive factors of spiritual man- 
hood that must be grown by culture under the 
shining of the Sun of Righteousness and the 
ministry of the dew r s of heaven, and that the 
attempts of physical force to compel an out- 
ward appearance of spiritual self-government 
were of little avail, and that this method as 
the dominating spirit of the church was blind- 
ing the eyes of men to the essentials of spiritual 
character and power. This one effort was the 
only prohibition speech I ever made after my 
ordination to the Christian ministry. 

I can only say that in this first pastorate 
I did my very best according to my knowledge, 
and that, measured by such evidences as are 
visible, the work was greatly blessed. The 
church was one of the older churches of the 
state, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary dur- 
ing my pastorate. During those seven years 
the resident membership increased 90 per cent. 
When I tendered my resignation, to go to 



4 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

Kansas City, the people promptly pledged a 
50 per cent increase in salary, and when we in- 
sisted on going they gave such visible tokens 
of affection as we shall never forget. 



My second pastorate was in the Beacon 
Hill church in Kansas City, where I also re- 
mained seven years. When I con my wife's 
scrap-book of newspaper clippings, the first 
public token of my temperance attitude ap- 
pears to have occurred in the spring of 1908, 
when I am reported to have given an address 
before the Prohibition Club of Kansas City on 
the subject, "Why," As a Minister, I Am Not a 
Prohibitionist." 

Early in the next year — the winter and 
spring of 1909 — a persistent effort was made 
by the prohibitionists to secure from the Mis- 
souri legislature the submission of a prohibi- 
tion amendment to a vote of the people. Min- 
isters' associations passed the customary reso- 
lutions addressed to their representatives. It 
occurred to me that it would be an act of 
cowardice and bad citizenship for ministers 
who did not believe with the majority of their 
brethren to remain silent, permitting the reso- 
lutions of the association to pass as unanimous 
when in fact they were far from so. There- 
fore I wrote to the state senator from Kansas 
City, indicating that I was one who did not be- 
lieve with the majority on this matter. 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 5 

A clipping from the Kansas City Star, 
bearing date of April 27, 1909, quotes from my 
brief note to the state senator merely this, 
"Prohibition works on the wrong principle. 
Reform must come from within the man, and 
not from outside forces." 

During the month of May, 1909, I gave 
three Sunday evening addresses on the tem- 
perance question. These were quite fully re- 
ported in the daily press at the time, and wide- 
ly copied. According to the report in the Kan- 
sas City Journal, the opening address of the 
series began with this proposition: "I have 
come, through more than twenty years close 
study of the question, and intimate experience 
of license, local option and prohibition meth- 
ods, to be convinced that we shall not be pre- 
pared to deal successfully with the temperance 
question until we have diverted our attention 
from prohibition and given it up. It is mis- 
taken in its method, erroneous in its moral dis- 
tinctions, and unjust in its application." 

The day after the publication of this first 
address the Kansas City papers carried on the 
front page the reports of the "excitement 
around the attorney general's office" at To- 
peka occasioned by my utterances. The as- 
sistant attorney general of Kansas was quoted 
as saying, "I cannot help but suspect that he 
is doing so for the money there is in it." 

Thus I had my first experience of false 
accusation from those who pose as the good 
people, and whose accusations require no 



6 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

ground of fact, but only the wish to asperse 
the character of those whose reasoning they 
are unable to meet in open and honorable dis- 
cussion. 

The vicious attacks which were made up- 
on me at that time served to bring me to a 
realization of the fact that I must study the 
whole question more deeply, in order that I 
might be able to give, both from the theoretical 
and from the practical sides, the reasons for 
the faith that was in me. Therefore, for two 
or three years I embraced every proper occa- 
sion to obtain first-hand knowledge. During 
my vacations in Boston and Chicago and many 
other cities, and also at other times when the 
opportunity offered, I made myself quite fa- 
miliar with all sorts and conditions of men 
as they are to be seen in the drinking places of 
our villages and cities. Scores of times have 
I gone into saloons and restaurants and pur- 
chased a glass of beer and sat down to watch 
and listen and become familiar with the char- 
acter and purpose and conduct of the vast 
numbers of men who spend their social hour 
of the day in these places. This was during 
my last year in Kansas City and my first year 
in Sioux City, 1909-10. 

During my last year in Kansas City there 
occurred an incident which has attracted 
more notice, I think, than it deserves. It has 
always been my deliberate purpose to seek 
and to try to understand all sorts and condi- 
tions of men. This purpose has led me into 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 7 

very close association with the unions of or- 
ganized labor. Soon after going to Kansas 
City I was elected by the Congregational min- 
isters' association as their fraternal delegate 
to the central labor union. I was soon elected 
chaplain by the labor union men. Having 
-started thus as fraternal delegate from the 
ministers' association, I continued to attend 
the central labor union during the years of my 
Kansas City pastorate merely in virtue of my 
personal interest and their hearty welcome. 
For five years I acted as their chaplain, open- 
ing every meeting with prayer. 

After more than four years in this rela- 
tion, I came to feel a desire to see the work of 
the unions more intimately as it is to be seen 
in the meetings of the various trade "locals." 
This desire I expressed one day when talking 
with a group of union men. The financial sec- 
retary of the central body was present and 
heard my remark. He was a member of the 
bartenders' union. Some weeks later, while 
I was on my vacation in New England, a copy 
of a Kansas City daily was sent to me, from 
which I learned that the bartenders had elected 
me fraternal or honorary member. This opened 
thus unexpectedly a new field of acquaintance. 
Without hesitation I accepted the implied in- 
vitation and attended regularly their meetings 
during the remainder of my stay in Kansas 
City. 

This act has been recently, six years after 
the event, named by my ministerial brethren as 



8 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

one of four reasons why I am disqualified for 
the Congregational ministry. I know in my 
own heart that it has not disqualified me for 
the ministry of Jesus Christ. He also was ac- 
cused by the churchmen of his time as one who 
ate with publicans and sinners. 

I love to associate with men, though I 
have never desired to be a "mixer" in the sense 
of flattering men or playing upon their cupid- 
ity for the sake of using them as pawns in the 
building of an apparent success. I love to have 
men come to church, yet I trust I have not 
been guilty of measuring the value of my fel- 
lowship with labor union men merely by the 
number of them that have come to fill my 
pews. 

Neither do I desire to have it given out 
that I associate with them "in order to lift 
them up," as some of my ministerial friends 
have tried to have me say. This attitude 
smacks of the "I am holier than thou" spirit, 
which I think does little good to those whom 
one would help, while disqualifying the would- 
be helper for any real usefulness. I hope that 
my associations with men are from the sincere 
drawings of fellowship with those who, like 
myself, are children of the one heavenly Fath- 
er, all of them hungering and thirsting in spirit 
and often weary and heavy laden, though al- 
ways capable of finding the higher strength 
and happiness for which infinite love has 
created them. 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 9 

On February 4, 1910, I gave an address 
before the National Model License League at 
its annual convention held in St. Louis. The 
convention paid my traveling expenses from 
Kansas City. This was the first time I ever 
received money (if payment of traveling ex- 
penses can be called 'receiving money') for 
any utterance or writing on the temperance 
question. In that address, which was after- 
ward printed under the title, "Common Sense 
and the Drink Problem," occur these sen- 
tences: 

"To be entirely frank with you, I have 
tried from a thousand different points of ap- 
proach to see if I could make my reason and 
conscience consent to the prohibition doc- 
trines and practice. My associations and in- 
terests have been, and are, such as to lead me 
to be, so far as in human power lies, sure I 
am right before going ahead." (Page 13.) 

On page 8 of this address, referring back 
to the experiences of the preceding year, I say, 
"My. thought and observation up to that time 
had been simply the effort of my mind to find 
for myself a satisfactory basis of conduct. I 
had always been a total abstainer. But for fif- 
teen years I had not been able to work with 
the prohibitionists. I had not publicly antag- 
onized them. But I had come to feel that they 
were mistaken in the principles upon which 
they based their efforts; that from the prac- 
tical viewpoint they must inevitably fail; and 
that the ultimate spirit and temper into which 



io A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

their crusade led them was extravagant, un- 
truthful, and unchristian. " 

About the first of February, 1910, the 
First Congregational church of Sioux City, 
having spent six months in looking up my his- 
tory and record, and having sent a committee 
of two gentlemen to Kansas City to hear me 
preach and to investigate my work there, ex- 
tended me a call to the pastorate. 

As one looks back upon any piece of work, 
it is with a humiliating sense of the meager- 
ness of the reality as compared with the ideal. 
One would like to forget mere external facts 
and events, while treasuring up the spiritual 
rewards that are revealed in friendships and 
in growing capacity for spiritual fellowships. 
Yet it seems necessary at times, in view of the 
inability to count or measure the invisible 
realities, to resort to facts and figures. Meas- 
ured by these inadequate tests, the seven years 
in Kansas City seem to have been what men 
call a success. The membership of the church 
grew from 145 to 354. At the beginning of the 
fifth year the salary was increased forty per 
cent. The work of the Sunday School had 
ben the subject of special articles in the OUT- 
LOOK, the LADIES' HOME JOURNAL, 
the RELIGIOUS EDUCATION magazine. 
When the resignation was tendered, after 
nearly seven years of service, the congregation 
urgently requested that it be reconsidered, and 
a number of men immediately doubled their 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. n 

financial pledges. The Kansas City Star and 
Times presented editorials which one would 
like to live up to. 

Perhaps at this point I should turn aside 
from the direct course of my narrative to no- 
tice one of the four indictments which my 
brother ministers have brought against me, 
viz., that I am "a personal user of liquor." 

In the summer of 1908 I consulted a 
friend in the medical profession and received 
from him the suggestion that I try at the close 
of the day a certain tonic which he mentioned. 
I did so for a time. I soon discovered that 
the tonic he had perscribed was simply beer 
under a different name. During the next two 
or three years I experimented with the use of 
a bottle of beer with a light lunch at the close 
of my day's work. I found that it met my 
need, and most of the time since then I have 
followed this practice. 

My personal habit, and my religious op- 
position to the legalistic methods for the pro- 
motion of temperance, have, so far as I know, 
no connection whatever with one another, ex- 
cept this — that if I believed that prohibition 
were a Christian method, or that it offered any 
real solution of the temperance question, I 
should be ready to undergo personal incon- 
venience and sacrifice in my personal habits 
for the sake of my prohibition convictions. 
The following paragraph from a letter which 



12 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

I wrote more than four years ago to a friend 
who had called in question my practice, seems 
in place here: 

"There are two points that stand out very 
clearly in my own mind — (1) I must follow in 
practice the method which my own thought 
and experience at any given time seem to in- 
dicate as best calculated to build me up phy- 
sically and mentally and spiritually to live the 
life and do the work for which I think the 
Creator has made me; (2) I have come, 
through more than twenty years of thought 
and experience, to the clear conviction that 
many of the temperance people of America, in 
their haste to find a panacea for the evils of 
intemperance, have disregarded some of the 
fundamental and unchangeable principles upon 
which human character and happiness must 
be founded/' 

With the exception of the two years of in- 
vestigation in 1909-10, which I have men- 
tioned above, I have never purchased nor used 
any alcoholic beverages except as here de- 
scribed. It seems a bit saddening sometimes 
to reflect how easily many people who are 
well-meaning, but one-sided in their emphasis 
and narrowly restricted in their experience of 
virtue, can characterize as "gluttons and wine- 
bibbers" those who before God are more tem- 
perate than themselves. 

That part of my story upon which I now 
enter is a chapter of experience which it had 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 13 

never occurred to me, until the last few weeks, 
that I might find it my duty to recite. I had 
assumed, as I fear most of our ministers do, 
that it was my business to allow people to do 
to me what they will, and myself to go on in 
silence. 

Long ago I discovered that a man's own 
moral health depends upon his acting in the 
light. I have also come to see that the moral 
health and stability of society requires that all 
those activities of men which are designed for 
the education and control of the people shall 
be brought to the light. As far back as the 
beginning of my college days I had drawn a 
line of red ink under the words of Jesus in my 
old Bible, /Tor there is nothing covered that 
shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall 
not be known." But I fear I have never fully 
learned, unless perchance I have learned it 
now, that man is frequently to be God's agent 
in bringing all things to the light. 

(Just at this point in my writing, the post- 
man has brought me words of counsel from 
one who has been for twenty-five ears a con- 
spicuous church leader in America. His pre- 
scription for my case is, "Pitiless publicity — 
simply state the facts clearly and keep doing 
it." I have been endeavoring for some months 
to have my accusers give me a chance to state 
my case to them in some orderly way; or to 
have them co-operate with me in making an 
opportunity for a statement of the case before 



14 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

a competent church council. They have de- 
clined to do either. See "Correspondence" in 
this volume.) 

On March 1, 1910, I came to the pastorate 
of the Sioux City church. Almost immediately 
the Anti-Saloon League made arrangements 
for a Sunday evening prohibition mass meet- 
ing which was to be addressed by an Anti- 
Saloon League attorney of Kansas City, Kan- 
sas, and invited me to abandon my Sunday 
evening service and participate in their meet- 
ing. In my church leaflet of April 24, 1910, I 
mentioned this invitation, and gave my rea- 
sons for not wishing to accept it. 

During the first four months of my pas- 
torate in Sioux City I printed a series of four 
sermons, one each month, which have nothing 
to do with the temperance question, and which 
have been mentioned by some very thoughtful 
people as my best piece of work. These were 
given out at the door of the church from Sun- 
day to Sunday by a committee of the men's 
club. On April 24 the committee gave out, 
along with these sermons, some copies of my 
address, "Common Sense and the Drink Prob- 
lem." Objections were raised to the distribu- 
tion of this address, and no more copies were 
handed out. 

The question of my temperance views 
having thus been stirred up, I gave three 
Sunday evening addresses on the subject May 
8th to 22d inclusive. These seemed to give 
general satisfaction to the people who attend- 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 15 

ed, and the discussion of this question sub- 
sided. During the first ten months of the pas- 
torate (from March 1st to the end of 1910) 
sixty-one people united with the church, as 
shown in the year book, audiences were good, 
and the opportunity for useful work seemed 
inviting. 

In November of the first year of my pas- 
torate I spoke again on the temperance ques- 
tion on a Sunday evening soon after the au- 
tumn elections. So far as I am aware, no par- 
ticular notice was taken of this sermon, except 
that one member of the church came to my 
study to counsel me to drop the subject. 

The occasions here noticed are the only 
mention, so far as I know, that I made of the 
temperance question during the first four 
years and two months of my pastorate. If 
there is any other mention, it is merely inci- 
dental and negligible. For three and a half 
years before the trouble of May, 1914, the topic 
had not been touched. I am not defending the 
wisdom of what I did or said. I am simply 
giving the facts. All that I said is in print, and 
may be consulted by anyone who cares to take 
the trouble. 

Had I been in a church of organization 
and habit different from the Sioux City church, 
the events of May, 1914, and a thread of se- 
quential events, would never have occurred. 
There have, for many years, been influences 
and methods operating in this church which 



16 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

are not found here alone, but which are more 
pronounced here than in any other place that 
has come to my notice. 

It seems necessary to call attention to the 
fact that my pastorate continued longer than 
any other in this church since 1900. It should 
be noted also that the conditions here existing 
were described with general accuracy in a ser- 
mon preached in the pulpit of the church on 
the first Sunday morning of September, 1906, 
by the pastor on the occasion of his resignation 
after a pastorate of one year and eight months. 
This sermon was printed in full in the local 
press on the next day, and may be consulted 
by any who are interested. During the next 
three and one-half years, until I came, there 
was another pastorate that continued one year 
and eight months, the other months being 
filled with interim preachers. 

The Sioux City church is the central 
church, so far as the Congregational denomina- 
tion is concerned, of a large territory. No true 
minister of Jesus Christ can occupy this pulpit 
without feeling the responsibility for a service 
that shall be intellectually and spiritually vital. 
To such a service the vast majority of the con- 
gregation are as responsive as the members 
of any average church. Some members of the 
church are as generous in their response as 
any I have ever known. But there are certain 
elements in the church whose eyes are wholly 
blinded by the god of this world. The con- 
spicuous members of this unseeing group are 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 17 

not more than two or three per cent of the 
church membership. But their financial inter- 
relation with one another and with other busi- 
ness men of the church is such, and the organ- 
ization of the church is such, that they have 
ruled the church in its critical moments for 
many years. It has seemed to me that the fires 
of experience must surely purify the spirit of 
the church. But each crisis seems only to 
drive away the more peaceable and responsive 
members, and leave the institution more hope- 
lessly unseeing. 

The official or ruling church comprises 
roughly speaking about five per cent of the 
church membership. These are seldom much 
changed except by death. There has been no 
new blood in the board of deacons in the mem- 
ory of the present generation, except as re- 
moval from the city, or death, has made it nec- 
essary. The senior deacon is the most influen- 
tial member of the church. (See my letter of 
May 1st to the Rev. J. O. Thrush, page 64.) 

Near the end of my fourth year I suggest- 
ed at a meeting of the Advisory Committee 
(consisting of the deacons and three or four 
other persons) the desirability of rotation in 
office, to the end that a larger number of mem- 
bers might gain the experience and share the 
responsibility of office. The deacons all as- 
sented to the idea. But I knew I must act 
with patience, so I let the matter lie without 
action, or even mention outside the Advisory 
Committee. After some weeks I mentioned 



18 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

the matter again at a meeting of the Advisory 
Committee. The deacons again all assented to 
it. Still I did not act, waiting for mature con- 
sideration by the deacons. What was my sur- 
prise to have one of the deacons rise in prayer 
meeting one evening a few weks later and be- 
gin a rambling argument against rotation of 
office for deacons. He revealed the fact that 
the matter had been rankling in his breast all 
the time, and that he had by special effort got- 
ten together on this particular evening a large 
attendance of those from whom he expected to 
receive political support, and was utilizing 
the occasion for the purpose of getting an ex- 
pression of the church against any change. 
He had gotten it into his head that the change 
had already been made, and that a vote was 
needed to reverse the action which I had pre- 
cipitated. With some difficulty I helped him 
to understand that no change in the old order 
had been made, nor even mentioned outside 
the Advisory Committee. 

There has been for many years a constant 
ferment going on, of which the general mem- 
bership of the church seems to know nothing 
until from time to time it breaks into view in 
some such scene as that of May, 1914. There 
comes to mind an incident that occurred in the 
winter of 1913-1914. The men's class, which 
had always been a problem so far as attend- 
ance was concerned, had been worked up to a 
regular attendance of twenty-five or thirty. A 
different leader was chosen for each week. It 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 19 

was indicated to the pastor that a certain man 
would like to lead the class one Sunday. The 
committee gave him the desired opportunity. 
He launched immediately into a public attack 
upon the pastor, alleging a grievance growing 
out of a conversation with the pastor two or 
three years before. The pastor had never be- 
fore suspected or dreamed of any grievance 
lurking in that conversation. The pastor ex- 
plained the misapprehension of the brother. 
(It probably would have been wiser for the 
pastor to have remained silent.) The large 
majority of the class were dumbfounded. Sev- 
eral of them came no more, saying that it was 
not for the revelation of such spirit that they 
came to Sunday school. As a result of the 
pastor's effort on that day to allay the broth- 
er's misapprehension, one of the men then 
present, accused the pastor, at a public meet- 
ing of the church a few weeks later, with call- 
ing the brother a liar. 

I mention these incidents to give a faint 
idea of what was going on beneath the surface 
from the first day of my pastorate, and of 
which the general church usually knew noth- 
ing. One of my predecessors in the pastorate, 
as mentioned above, described ten years ago 
the condition, which seems to have grown 
worse rather than better. 

Probably no person acquainted with the 
church would venture to question that the life 
of the church at the end of April, 1914, was 
marked by unusual visible tokens of prosper- 



20 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

ity. One of the oldest members had publicly 
remarked that the annual meeting in January 
had been the best in the history of the church. 
More people had united with the church dur- 
ing the preceding twelve months than in any 
year for a decade. A glance at the size of the 
morning congregations, in the record kept for 
many years by one of the members, reveals an 
average attendance for the ten Sundays fol- 
lowing March 1st as follows: In 1908, a few 
months after my predecessor came to the pas- 
torate, the average was 246; in 1910, the first 
three months of my pastorate, the average 
was 284; in 1912, it was 258; in 1914, for the 
same period, it was 286. 

The evening congregations for the pre- 
ceding six or seven months had averaged 125 
— not large, but the largest I had known in 
my experience of the church. 

There were reasons for this slowly rising 
tide of prosperity — reasons which I well under- 
stood, and which others frequently mentioned. 
For several years I had been moved by a deep- 
ening feeling that our churches, in the main, 
are not doing for humanity the thing which it 
is their chief business to do — that the central 
springs of the soul's health and happiness 
were not being reached. When I left Sioux 
City ten months before for my first long vaca- 
tion since entering the ministry, it was with 
far deeper interest in personal spiritual cul- 
ture than in the sights I was to see on my first 
visit abroad. The Monday morning in June, 






A THREAD OF HISTORY. 21 

1913, when I was to take the 6:50 train for the 
journey that was to end in Europe, I had gone 
to my study in the church at 3:30 in the morn- 
ing for meditation and prayer. It was in that 
spirit that the summer was spent, and in four 
weeks in England and Scotland I attended 
church twenty times because I found thus 
what I most wanted. It was in that spirit 
that I took up my work on my return. 

Besides this, the church had had now 
four years of apparent peace and uninterrupted 
prosperity, and people of the city were coming 
to feel that a new chapter was opening, and 
the years of strife were over. 

But in the midst of all this, unseen by the 
casual church attendant, the ferment of strife 
was more actively at work. Incidents like the 
attack of the class leader, and the alarm of the 
deacon, above mentioned, seemed to appear 
unheralded as clouds form in a humid atmos- 
phere. The closer the truth and love of Christ 
came home to the hearts of the people, the 
more was stirred the determination in the 
minds of the old-time trouble makers to find 
or create occasions of strife. I closed my eyes 
to these incidents so far as possible. I knew 
more surely every day that there was no hope 
for the continued peace of the church except 
in the warm breath of the spirit of the Christ, 
to lift the many above the reach of discord, 
and to convert or make ashamed the emissaries 
of strife. 



22 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

God forbid that I should seem to pose as 
one free from mistake, or as a martyr. Yet 
with all that I know now of deeper experience 
and increased strength through the cleansing 
fires of the last two years, I solemnly declare 
that I believe no power that, humanly speak- 
ing, could have been brought to bear could 
have saved the Church unitedly. The deeper 
the spirit of the congregation grew, the more 
aggressive became the Adversary in the form 
of certain men who never agreed even with one 
another except when they combined to fight 
against the spiritual progress of the Church. 
I might multiply incidents almost without end. 

The crisis came in the form of an Anti- 
Saloon campaign in the spring of 1914. The 
League brought to Sioux City as their chief 
worker a man who was advertised as a con- 
verted saloonkeeper from Danville, 111." I paid 
no heed to the campaign. I knew the salvation 
of the Church I was serving depended on one 
thing, and that was the mind and spirit of 
Christ growing into a dominant atmosphere in 
the heart of the congregation. But the League 
paid insistent attention to me. 

On Sunday morning, April 26, one of the 
deacons said to me, just before the Church 
service, that the deacons wanted an Anti- 
Saloon League speaker to occupy the pulpit the 
next Sunday. There was a tone of passion in 
the deacon's voice such as I had never heard 
in him before. I called a meeting of the Ad- 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 23 

visory Committee at the close of the evening 
service that day. I said to them that I had not 
intended to take part in the campaign. I 
called their attention to the fact that my atti- 
tude was the same as when I came to them, 
and that I could not put an Anti-Saloon League 
speaker in my pulpit without the necessity 
of explaining that my own attitude had not 
changed, but that I would consent to the 
speaker they desired if they would consent 
simply to my letting the public know, by a 
statement either in or out of the pulpit, that 
my convictions on that point had not essen- 
tially changed. The deacons insisted that the 
speaker be put in the pulpit and that I keep 
still. The deacon who had spoken to me in 
the morning, urged that the president of the 
Anti-Saloon League had been pressing him 
for an appointment for their speaker in my pul- 
pit. Finally the deacons passed a motion that 
such a speaker be put in the pulpit the next 
Sunday morning. I explained to them that I 
was placed in charge of the pulpit by the con- 
gregation; that the deacons had authority to 
fill the pulpit only in my absence; and that, 
if they should insist, I would agree with them 
to carry the matter to the congegation. The 
deacon afore mentioned remarked to the others 
that if they appealed to the congregation Mr. 
Short would beat them four to one. So the 
meeting adjourned. 

While the meeting of the Advisory Com- 
mittee was going on in my study, the convert- 



24 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

ed saloonkeeper from Danville was making a 
public attack upon me in the pulpit of a neigh- 
boring church. On reading the report of this 
attack next day, I prepared a brief statement 
of facts to correct his falsifications of fact, 
closing my statement by saying that my past 
"utterances were made after years of careful 
and sincere thinking. I am willing that they 
shall be taken as representing my present 
views and convictions. " 

Having thus set myself right with the 
public, I stepped to the telephone and request- 
ed the Anti-Saloon League president to fur- 
nish a speaker for my pulpit the next Sunday 
morning, intending to accord him courteous 
treatment, say nothing on the temperance 
question myself, and then go forward with the 
spiritual work that lay nearest to my heart. 

But, on Tuesday, even before my state- 
ment had appeared in print, reports began to 
come to my ears regarding a meeting of the 
Advisory Committee, the Trustees, and other 
persons, fifteen or twenty in all, that had been 
held at the home of the senior deacon without 
my knowledge on Monday night. An attor- 
ney had been requested to examine the consti- 
tution of the Church to see whether the dea- 
cons or the pastor had authority to fill the pul- 
pit. It was discovered, as reported to me by 
persons present, that this authority belonged 
to the pastor. The meeting had lasted till 
past midnight, and had been of so tense a 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 25 

nature that its effects were plainly visible next 
day on the faces of those present. It was 
plainly to be seen that the elements of discon- 
tent were determined to force the issue against 
the pastor, and that the senior deacon had 
made up his mind to give these elements their 
day by presiding over them while they did 
their work. 

It was evident to me at once that the only 
thing I could do, being pressed into this sort of 
conflict, was to act out my part conscien- 
tiously and openly. I canceled the request for 
an Anti-Saloon League speaker in my pulpit, 
and announced for my morning sermon 
"Christian Temperance." The sermon is in 
print. My reason and conscience respond to 
it with satisfaction today. 

Rumors of a petition calling for the resig- 
nation of the pastor began to fill the air. Every 
evidence of discord was paraded as a 
reason why members who themselves had no 
grievance should yet sign the petition. The 
stand of the pastor with reference to the Anti- 
Saloon League speaker was proclaimed as evi- 
dence of a domineering spirit. 

It seems necessary to explain at this point, 
that the laws of Iowa ordained that in the case 
of an anti-saloon campaign every person who 
had voted in the last preceding election was 
counted automatically as voting for prohibi- 
tion unless he actually appeared and signed the 
"saloon consent petition." If the voter in the 
last preceding election had died, or moved out 



26 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

of town, he was counted as voting for pro- 
hibition, as was also the case if he took no 
action of any sort. On Sunday evening, April 
26th, occurred the meeting of the Advisory 
Committee above described. On Monday eve 
ning, April 27, occured the meeting of church 
officials and others at the home of the senior 
deacon. On Saturday, May 2, I signed the 
consent petition. On Sunday, May 3, I 
preached the sermon on "Christian Temper- 
ance" which was printed in the daily papers 
next morning. No one of the church knew of 
•my vote on the prohibition question until Mon- 
day, May 4, except as the congregation on 
Sunday morning, May 3, might have guessed 
it from the following sentence in the sermon: 
"Neither my reason nor my conscience would 
permit me today to vote for prohibition. The 
laws of Iowa are such that, because I voted in 
the municipal election this spring, I have to be 
counted one way or the other in the present 
issue. The law leaves me no choice. " 

For the four Sundays beginning May 3rd 
there were enacted such scenes as I had never 
dreamed of in a church. Every Sunday morn- 
ing, either just before the hour for the serv- 
ice, or just before the sermon was to begin, 
some officer of the church would present to me 
some new official document to be considered 
or notice to be read. A number of the officers 
never occupied their accustomed seats during 
those days. They remained in the vestibule 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 2; 

to labor with all who entered the church. They 
would appear by ones and twos and threes, 
now at this door, now at that, and gaze at the 
minister as if they expected to see him faint. 
They would stand in the door after the sermon 
had begun and look at the minister and talk 
with animation. If they sat at all during the 
service, it was to draw a chair near the door 
just outside. 

On Saturday evening, May 9, after I had 
gone home for the evening, the petition ask- 
ing for my resignation was left on my desk 
at the church. It contained the names of one 
in six of the resident membership. After eight 
paragraphs each beginning with "Whereas, " 
it proceeds as follows: 

"Therefore be it resolved, That we, the 
undersigned members of the First Congrega- 
tional Church, Sioux City, Iowa, or members 
of the Society of the said Church ask, and we 
do hereby ask, Wallace M. Short to resign im- 
mediately as pastor of the Church, and we ask 
the proper officers of the Church and Society 
to call such meetings as may be necessary, and 
do such things as may be required to accept 
such resignation if received, and if not received 
to proceed to terminate the pastorate of said 
Wallace M. Short as soon as possible." 

To this was attached a formal affidavit, 
signed and sworn before a notary public, de- 
claring the correctness of the copy. 

Under the leadership of men accustomed 
to political manipulations, various cut-and- 



28 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

dried actions were taken by the church and 
then reported as unanimous "no member dis- 
senting," to give the impression of unanimity 
against the pastor where no opportunity for 
due consideration was given and where -no 
unanimity existed. All these demonstrations 
were designed to make an impression on per- 
sons who had heretofore supposed that all 
was going well. Some members signed the 
petition protesting that they had no griev- 
ance. 

A committee of the trouble makers was 
sent to the Iowa Congregational State Con- 
ference then in session at Marshalltown. This 
committee waited on the resolutions com- 
mittee of the State Conference, as reported in 
the Marshalltown Times-Republican, and got 
a resolution reported that could be brought 
home to Sioux City for use against the pastor. 
Several leading ministers protested that it was 
un-Congregational for the State Conference to 
take sides in the controversy of a local church, 
and especially so when they had heard only 
one side. But, said the Marshalltown paper, 
"the conference was in no mood to be halted 
by any such technicality. It was on a trail 
that was warm." 

The deacons sent a long letter to each 
member of the church enumerating many 
grievances against the pastor, reminding them 
of this "last outbreak on his part," and ex- 
pressing the hope "that Mr. Short, in the com- 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 29 

ing days, may come to see the light; that he 
may be saved from himself." 

Motives of personal financial interest 
were brought into full play. I was frankly 
told by one of my best friends that if he was 
known to be active in my behalf, he would lose 
the borrowed capital on which depended his 
continuance in business. 

So for a month I witnessed the god of this 
world as he had his day, bawling through the 
precincts of the church, trampling and spitting 
upon the spirit of the Christ in the hearts of 
men and women and children who know more 
or less clearly a higher way of living but who 
lacked the financial influence or the experience 
in that sort of conflict or the democratic or- 
ganization to play a winning part in the day 
of passion. Had the church been demo- 
cratically organized, so that a larger number 
of the members should have had experience in 
leadership, such a campaign could never have 
taken place. Had I then been seasoned in all 
the experiences that have overtaken me since, 
the issue would have been met quite different- 
ly on my part. What is taking years would 
have been accomplished in a few days, or a 
few weeks at most. Such would.be the value 
of a true preparedness on the part of our min- 
istry. For the lack of this preparedness our 
ministry is declining in the power of leader- 
ship in the supreme things of the spirit, and 



30 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

the ministry as a calling is correspondingly 
losing its influence and its appeal to young 
men. 

To the man who presided over this dem- 
onstration of material force against me I wish 
here to pay this tribute of respect, that in the 
midst of those days he said to a friend of mine, 
that if all ministers would stand for their 
rights of leadership as Mr. Short was doing, 
the influence of the ministry would be more 
worth while. 

Surely no true Christian would commend 
in a minister a mere over-sensitiveness to the 
prerogatives of his position. And surely every 
one knows that influence derived from mere 
prestige of ministerial office is a thing of the 
past. But young men are not likely to flock 
to the standards of the church unless the 
"leader" of the church is able to exercise some 
real power of leadership in the critical mo- 
ments of the church history. 

The meeting at which the church was "to 
proceed to terminate the pastorate" was finally 
called for Sunday afternoon, May 24, the Sun- 
day on which the pastor had already an- 
nounced in the church leaflet that he was to 
be absent preaching at Grinnell College in ex- 
change with the president of the college. It 
happened, however, that the president was or- 
dered by his physician to a hospital in Chicago 
some days before the date of the proposed ex- 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 31 

change, and the pastor, contrary to the expec- 
tations of his accusers, was present on the Sun- 
day of the called meeting. 

If it is possible for events like that meet- 
ing, and the acts that preceded it, to occur, 
then it is important that ministers, who are to 
understand and help to improve the condi- 
tions of our churches, should be in them. 

On the morning of that day I resigned, 
contrary, as I realized then to the real judg- 
ment of my wife. I now think she felt more 
clearly than I saw. 

The preceding week at the earnest plead- 
ing of my life-long friend, the pastor of the 
Marshalltown church, I had remained away 
from the Iowa State Conference at Marshall- 
town, where I was to have preached the con- 
ference sermon. Here also I now think I took 
a mistaken course. The State Conference had 
elected me to preach the sermon. A trustee 
of the Marshalltown church had declared, as 
reported in the public press, that if I came to 
Marshalltown he would lock the doors of the 
church against me. My friend, the pastor, 
afterward explained to me, that if he had per- 
mitted me to come to Marshalltown he would 
have jeopardized his own pastorate. 

If forces of darkness are not finally to rule 
the church, then it is necessary that they be 
brought to the light. They can never be seen 
in action, and therefore in complete revelation, 
except as someone challenges them and per- 
mits them to do their worst. Democracy can 



32 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

never be educated and saved by yielding to 
political intrigue acting from motives of cu- 
pidity and fear behind the closed doors of 
secret committee rooms. 

The church leaflet during those weeks is 
crowded with printed matter of various sorts, 
all selected or written by myself. These 
printed pages breathe the spirit which I felt 
and which I tried to express. 

So the pastorate was at an end. In four 
years more than 250 persons had united with 
the church. The Tri-State Congregational 
Club had been organized, and the ministers 
and laymen of the Sioux City territory had sev- 
eral times been gathered in Sioux City for fel- 
lowship and to meet and hear church leaders 
of national influence, such as Charles M. Shel- 
don, Graham Taylor, Washington Gladden. 
The minister had attempted to show a real in- 
terest in people of all sorts and conditions. To 
these efforts the main part of the church, nu- 
merically considered, responded well. 

But a little group of men persistently, 
each for himself and in his own way, sneered 
at these efforts on every possible occasion. 
Efforts such as had inspired the Kansas* City 
Star to say editorially in Feb., 1910, "Mr. Short 
gets the church into the life of the community 
and the life of men and women into the church. 
He belongs to the school of fine citizens and 
fine churchmen which Dr. Washington Glad- 
den and Dr. Lyman Abbott have exemplified 
in a wider field,'' moved a member of the boan* 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 33 

of trustees to retort to the pastor, "What do 
you know about social and industrial ques- 
tions? Attend to the business for which we 
hired you. Learn to keep your place.'' An- 
other member of the trustees would every now 
and then scoff at the people who were joining 
the church, saying, "These folks don't do us 
any good. You can't make that sort of folks 
mix with us. They don't help us financially. " 
The fact, however, is that these new people did 
measure up in worth of character with the 
older members. To the efforts for helpful fel- 
lowship with the ministers and churches of the 
Sioux City trade territory, as exemplified in 
the Tri-State Club, there came ridicule from 
the same trouble-making sources. A man of 
the church visited the pastor's study to ad- 
monish, "if you don't keep still on some sub- 
jects you will find your salary will come up 
missing." 

Dear reader, if a man is telling this 
story for personal vindication, it were better 
for him that a mill-stone were hanged about 
his neck and he were drowned in the depth of 
the sea. 

But if there is such a thing as a man feel- 
ing himself entrusted of God with some mis- 
sion and message of truth and brotherhood, 
and certain characteristic forces undertake in 
the name of religion to destroy the man's good 
name by dishonorable methods and persistent 
intrigue, it may be God's way of trying the 
Biaii cut, to equip him with intimate knowl- 



34 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

edge and experience and patience and courage 
to do the work that God is seeking to have 
done. 

My final sermon was from the words of 
Paul in the first half of the twenty-eighth verse 
of the eighth chapter of Romans. The sermon 
is in print in the daily press. 

The next day I announced the purpose to 
start a new church on September first. I re- 
frained from the acceptance of any sort of 
pledges of support, either personal or financial, 
until after the first month of the church, dur- 
ing which time I had outlined the spirit and 
purpose of the enterprise in the sermons, in 
the church leaflet, and in the public press. 
Then in the church leaflet for the fifth Sunday 
I reviewed the first month, and said, "our fi- 
nancial support is to come from anyone who 
wishes to see our work prosper. We are to 
seek to know God's work and do it. If our 
work is not of such a quality that anyone who 
contributes himself or his possessions will be 
tending all the time to become a better man 
or woman because of his contact with us, then 
our work is not of God and we are not God's 
workmen." 

On the thirty-first of the following Jan- 
uary, and on the twenty-fifth of the following 
April, I preached sermons on the temperance 
question. These were printed in full, and very 
widely circulated. Within a few weeks I had 
received letters of the highest praise for these 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. 35 

sermons from men and women of the highest 
possible station, both of church and state, in 
American life. 

Not until after the printing of these ser- 
mons did I ever speak outside of my own pul- 
pit on the temperance question since coming 
to Sioux City. I now determined to speak 
wherever opportunity offered, so far as time 
and strength would permit. 

The Sioux Association has attempted to 
"unfrock" me for lending my "assistance to 
the support of the legalized liquor traffic, by 
making speeches in its defense, by permitting 
his speeches to be used as campaign literature 
by state and national liquor organizations." 

This present address will doubtless be 
used against prohibition, along with the words 
of the most illustrious names in history even 
unto the present time. As to speaking in cam- 
paigns, democracy gets its education by hear- 
ing the discussion of great issues at times when 
the minds and interest of the people are 
awakened by public contest. The address 
which I have recently been giving on these oc- 
casions is printed at the end of this volume. 

The shame is not that a man should dis- 
cuss before the electorate questions whose 
solution reaches into the depths of political 
and religious principles. The shame is that 
the hand of physical and material force should 
have throttled discussion of these questions in 
the pulpit and on the Chautauqua platform. 
The shame is that a man may not even be per- 



36 A THREAD OF HISTORY. 

mitted to preach the gospel of Jesus peaceably 
in his pulpit unless he yields himself in sub- 
servience to the god of this world working by 
falsification of character and facts, and by 
secret intrigue and motives of cupidity. 

With the publication of this little volume, 
I shall have printed in all six sermons on the 
temperance question. There remain yet many 
things to be said. There is urgent need for a 
simple and comprehensive primer of the funda- 
mental principles of free democratic institu- 
tions. Such a primer should be suitable for use 
in the public schools, and should make clear 
what we mean by the separation of church and 
state, and by "sweet land of liberty. " How 
many people can give any intelligent answer to 
these questions? Is liberty merely the chance 
for anybody who can get the power to do any- 
thing he chooses to the rest of the people? Or 
has the term a more dignified significance? 

The greatest need is for men who have the 
patience and ability for open and honorable 
discussion. The pulpit that can supply this 
need may not have always an easy time, but it 
will command the respect of all thoughtful 
people, and will render to democracy and to 
religion a service that is absolutely indispen- 
sable to their health and perpetuity. 

I believe the church into which I was born 
stands historically for openness and fairness, 
for freedom and faith. I believe it bases min- 
isterial qualifications on intellectual sanity and 



A THREAD OF HISTORY. Z7 

heart purity, and not on concurrence in some 
momentarily prevailing code of opinion. It is 
for that reason that I make my stand, in the 
full confidence that I shall be able to prove it 
so. I should scorn myself as a soul occupied 
with petty and puerile personal interest, if I 
thought I were concerned with personal self- 
defense. But if God has summoned one to 
stand for freedom and faith, for light and 
purity, for grasp of intellect and power of 
spirit, for truth and love in the church that has 
taken Jesus of Nazareth for its guiding star 
and its saving spirit, then a man has a task 
that is worth sacrifice and the chastening of 
experience. Then one has a mission that may 
rightly summon him to all the love and devo- 
tion with which the artist goes to his task or 
the prophet pursues his mission or the Savior 
seeks human souls for the kingdom of divine 
redemption. 



38 






CORRESPONDENCE. 

WITH REFERENCE TO MY MINISTERIAL STANDING, 

Of the two or three hundred letters that 
came to me in the month of May, 1914, as the 
direct result of the disturbance in the church 
of w T hich I was pastor, perhaps none are more 
illuminating than those written by ministers, 
either from Marshalltown, where the Iowa 
State Congregational Conference was in ses- 
sion, May 19-21, or immediately following that 
Conference. These letters reveal, among 
other things, the character of the reports that 
were carried to Marshalltown by the commit- 
tee that was sent for that purpose from the 
Sioux City church, and, especially, the way in 
which those reports were taken at their full 
face value by the majority of the ministers, 
and acted upon without investigation. (See 
pages 28, 31, 40.) 

A number of the letters were of very fine 
spirit, if only they had been seasoned with 
wisdom and justice. Here is one, dated May 22, 
1914, from a minister who had known me and 
my family for many years. He pleads with me 
on the ground of the high Christian character 
of my family — naming them over one by one — 
to "come back to God and home." He says, 
"Tho your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as 



40 CORRESPONDENCE. 

wool; tho they be red like crimson, they shall 
be white as snow. Whatever you do, remem- 
ber your father's and mother's God." 

Here is one from an aged minister who 
had been entertained often in my father's home 
during my boyhood. He says: 

I plead with you as one who has known you 
from your childhood, and your good father and mother 
before you. I am quite certain that the Congregational 
denomination cannot long fellowship you if you con- 
tinue to hold the opinions which you have expressed 
and the practices in which you are said to indulge. 

In my church leaflet for February 7, 1915, 
I commented on the questions raised by this 
letter. 

Another minister wrote to a member of 
the church which I was serving to say that he 
thought he had once detected liquor on my 
breath at the time of a State Conference. I 
happen to know that I have never anywhere 
tasted liquor at the time of any State Confer- 
ence, in the twenty years of my ministry. 

These letters will indicate the way in 
which for the last two years reports have been 
spread, and acted upon without investigation 
— the Sioux Association studiously declining to 
give any opportunity for investigation. It has 
been assumed that one who holds such opin- 
ions as I have expressed in the last chapter of 
this book is too far gone in sin to be worthy 
of any hearing. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 41 

I am not sure but I feel as much like chid- 
ing myself with tardiness in dealing with the 
various situations that have arisen as I feel 
like chiding the brethren for their unfairness 
and injustice. It is, however, a little difficult 
to overtake rumors and reports that are assidu- 
ously circulated by interested parties, and be- 
lieved by church brethren who assume that the 
opinions of the last chapter of this book are 
prima facie evidence of almost any sort of 
guilt. 

Had I two years ago had the experience 
which I have since had, I should have been at 
Marshalltown to take prompt and determined 
action against the things that were there done. 
Having let that event pass, and having re- 
signed from the church in Sioux City, I had 
allowed the way to be paved for the series of 
actions and reports that have since come. 

For instance, in May, 1914, I was closing 
a successful year in the presidency of the Sioux 
City Ministerial Association. A few months 
later it was reported all over the country that 
I had been "kicked out" of the ministerial as- 
sociation. 

This incident of the ministerial associa- 
tion occurred without warning of any kind to 
anybody. The first intimation of any sort to 
me was the report in the newspaper, that I 
had been "ousted" from the association. I had 
paid my annual dues, and was attending as 
regularly as I, and many other ministers, had 
been accustomed to attend. But one day when 



42 CORRESPONDENCE. 

I was absent, the action was taken. The next 
day a friend voluntarily called me on the tele- 
phone and told me how it was done. The 
story given me was as follows: A certain 
minister who is a director of the Anti-Saloon 
League, and who at the beginning of my term 
as president of the Ministerial Association at- 
tempted to swing the association into line with 
a bitter anti-Catholic propaganda that had just 
been started in the city, but found me unwill- 
ing to let the association be committed to such 
an anti-Catholic crusade, and who had there- 
after absented himself from the meetings of 
the association during my presidency, came in- 
to the meeting of the association on the morn- 
ing in question, noted that I was absent and 
that the attendance was small, and went out 
and brought in a few ministers of like mind 
with himself, and moved and secured the pas- 
sage of the motion to expel me from member- 
ship. 

Several ministers of the association ex- 
pressed to me or to my friends their disap- 
proval of the action thus taken. But none of 
them ever did anything to make their disap- 
proval effective. I did nothing about it. 

Another incident serves as an interesting 
illustration. In the spring of 1916 I gave in a 
number of cities in Michigan the address which 
is printed in the last chapter of this volume. 
At Escanaba, Mich., Dr. Samuel Dickie, presi- 
dent of Albion College, and one time candidate 



CORRESPONDENCE. 43 

for governor on the prohibition ticket, chal- 
lenged me to debate, which challenge I ac- 
cepted. The report of the debate is given in 
the Escanaba Press of March 29, 1916. 

Dr. Dickie at once telegraphed to Rev. C. 
N. McMillan, superintendent of the Anti- 
Saloon League in Sioux City, and received 
from him a telegram which I printed without 
comment on my church leaflet for April 8, 
1916. This telegram was signed by twelve 
prominent Sioux City ministers, and occupied 
a quarter of a page in the Escanaba dailies, the 
space being paid for by the Anti-Saloon 
League. On my return home I stepped to the 
telephone and rang up as many of these twelve 
ministers as were at home at the time. I reach- 
ed six or seven of them. Only one of the six 
or seven had seen the telegram to which their 
names were signed. This one was the man 
who, as related above, had secured my "ex- 
pulsion" from the Sioux City Ministerial As- 
sociation. Some of the others had given con- 
sent to Rev. C. N. McMillan over the telephone 
to sign their names. One of them said he did 
not know that any such telegram had been 
sent. 

This telegram led the Escanaba prohibi- 
tion daily to comment at length on the "ex- 
posure" of Mr. Short's character, in the vein 
of these words which it used, "So vile is he — ." 



44 CORRESPONDENCE. 

*The first mention even made to me of any 
question about my standing in the Sioux Asso- 
ciation of Congregational Churches and Minis- 
ters, which is the legal custodian of my minis- 
terial standing, was in a letter from the regis- 
trar of the Association, dated October 4, 1915. 
This letter was received on the after- 
noon of Tuesday, October 5, and contained a 
copy of the program of the meeting of the 
Association which was to begin that same 
evening at Primghar. This was the first offi- 
cial notice that I had received of the meeting. 
This letter mentions complaints that had been 
received during "the last few days from prom- 
inent Congregational ministers" regarding my 
temperance teachings, and closes with the sug- 
gestion that "you ought in all fairness to with- 
draw from our fellowship. That would be the 
truly Christian course, I believe." 

On my request, when I met the registrar 
next day at Primghar, that he give me the 
names of the "prominent Congregational min- 
isters" who had complained to him, he men- 
tioned only the name of the assistant state 
superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League of 
Missouri. The register voluntered to say that 
the suggestion of his letter, that I should with- 
draw, was merely his personal thought, and 
had no official significance. 

I suggested to the registrar that the 
members of the association might like to hear 



*I have since learned that some of the ministers had been 
urging my expulsion ever since the trouble of May, 1914. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 45 

a few words from me. During the afternoon 
of that day I was asked to speak for five min- 
utes. In my talk I made no mention of the 
temperance question, merely speaking a few 
words about my new work in Sioux City. My 
wish was to let the brethren know that my 
spiritual life and outlook had suffered no 
eclipse. 

The fact was that the brethren had 
dropped me immediately after the church 
trouble in May, 19H. Before that time scarce- 
ly a week passed when there were not one or 
more of them in my study and home. After 
that no member of the Sioux Association ever 
visited me or wrote to me, except one, and this 
one was a man who was never present at the 
meetings of the Association. The only min- 
isters who ever came to my study during the 
months of trouble were four men of four de- 
nominations other than my own. I hope I 
have no feeling of complaint on this score. I 
merely wish to record facts; and also to in- 
dicate to my brethren that the program of 
"safety first" may be carried so far that it 
renders the fellowship of our ministry and 
churches of little value in time of need. 

I cannot permit myself to report these 
facts that are rather derogatory, without men- 
tioning, in the same connection, that there 
have been acts of fellowship by men in all parts 
of the country, many of them ministers of my 
own denomination, that have imparted to me 
from day to day the purpose to stand my 



46 CORRESPONDENCE. 

ground in loyalty to the higher and broader 
ideals of denominational fellowship. 

On the morning of the last day of the 
Primghar meeting the business committee pre- 
sented the following resolution: 

"Whereas the conduct and practice of Wallace M. 
Short, a member of this Sioux Association, in recent 
temperance propaganda, has been such as is utterly 
contrary to the principles laid down by the National 
Council of Congregational Churches, and published in 
their report on pages 295-296, and of the Iowa State 
Conference of Congregational Churches, same conduct 
and practice being such as cannot be approved by the 
members of the Sioux Association, , 

"Resolved, that we as an Association ask him to 
withdraw his name from membership with us before 
the end of this session." 



No act ever came to me as a more com- 
plete surprise. All the conversations I had 
had with the men were such as to give me 
assurance that no such act was contemplated. 
It may be that I am slow to interpret signs. 

Two or three of the ministers said this 
resolution was all news to them, and inquired 
as to the reasons for it. The chairman of the 
business committee finally remarked that the 
charges were too sickening and disgusting to 
talk about. Without further discussion the 
vote was taken, about one third of the minis- 
ters voting for the resolution, the others, with 
possibly one exception, not voting. 



ply : 



CORRESPONDENCE. 4; 

In the afternoon I read the following re- 



Dear Friends : — With the resolution in mind which 
was presented to you this morning by your business 
committee and adopted by the association, and in 
which I am requested to withdraw from the associa- 
tion at the present session, may I be permitted to say 
that it is my sincere wish to do the thing that is wise 
and right. Having never, until the time of the presen- 
tation of the resolution this morning, contemplated 
any such course as you suggest, I do not find myself 
able to determine at once in my own mind what is 
the wise and just thing to do. 

Having been consecrated by my parents in in- 
fancy in the Congregational church in this state; hav- 
ing united with the Congregational church at the age 
of fourteen years; having graduated with honor from 
Congregational college and theological school, both of 
the highest standing; having been ordained by a body 
of ministers and delegates among whom were men of 
national repute in our denomination ; having served 
with visible tokens of success for eighteen years in the 
Congregational ministry, and, especially, enjoying as 
I now do relations of mutual confidence and friend- 
ship with many Congregational ministers in all parts 
of the country, I am not able to bring myself to the 
step which you request without maturer considera- 
tion than it is possible for me to give to the matter in 
the three or four hours of the time allotted to me. 

I believe, brethren, that you will agree with me 
that in simple courtesy to many close personal friends 
in the Congregational ministry — men whom I have 
known from college and seminary days, none of whom 
is present here today — I ought to take time to coun- 



48 CORRESPONDENCE. 

sel with them, in order that I may not justly be chided 
for relinquishing lightly and inconsiderately that which 
I am sure the brethren of the Congregational churches 
desire should be held as of value — membership in the 
Congregational church and ministry. 

Meanwhile I shall take counsel also with brethren 
of the Sioux Association, and shall gratefully welcome 
any opportunity of personal conference or correspond- 
ence with any of them, to the end that in the near 
future, I may take such action as shall seem best for 
the good of all. 

My request for time to consider was 
granted, only two persons voting for, and 
none against. It was voted that the business 
committee be instructed to confer with me in 
the interval before the next meeting of the 
Association. 

The registrar in reporting the event to the 
"Congregational Iowa" monthly for Novem- 
ber, says, "Mr. Short being apprised that there 
was some feeling, requested the privilege of 
stating his position." If this might be taken 
as referring to my "position" on the temper- 
ance question, that is precisely the thing 
which I then, as in all my dealings with the 
Sioux Association, studiously refrained from 
doing. I make no pretentions to agreement 
with the majority of my brethren as to the best 
political policy to pursue in the promotion of 
temperance. I have never mentioned this mat- 
ter in their presence except when they have 
tried to commit me to the policy which I be- 
lieve is mistaken. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 49 

The registrar closes his report to "Con- 
gregational Iowa" with these words, "It is not 
easy to deal so with a likable brother who 
holds your heart-strings, and to whom God has 
given great talents." My contention has been 
that the brother is not called upon, either by 
the principles of Congregationalism or by the 
spirit of Christianity, to "deal so" with me. 
Henry Drummond, speaking of "dealing with 
doubt," says that the mistaken attitude of the 
church has always been to "brand him," where- 
as Christ said, "Teach him." I want to see my 
denomination rise to Christ's way. 

I am willing to be taught. I am willing 
for the church to declare from the house-tops 
that the majority of them disagree with me 
on this question of social policy. But, accord- 
ing to all authorities, when they withdraw fel- 
lowship from a minister, they declare by this 
act that he is guilty of "gross immorality, 
neglect of duty or of unfaithfulness to his or- 
dination vows." That is, these brethren seek 
to "brand" me as guilty of moral delinquency, 
because of disagreement in a matter of judg- 
ment as to a social policy. 

A month after the Primghar meeting I 
wrote to the registrar this letter: 



50 CORRESPONDENCE. 

Sioux City, Iowa, Nov. 3, 1915. 
Rev. James E. Brereton, 

Emmetsburg, Iowa, 
My Dear Brereton : — 

I am wondering if it might be worth while for 
the members of the Advisory Committee of the Sioux 
Association to acquaint themselves as well as they can, 
during the interval between now and the next meeting 
of the Association, with my work and teachings. I 
understand that the Committee consists of yourself, 
Mr. Thrush, Mr. Holden, Mr. McClain and Mr. Tower. 

I think it best for me to exercise complete frank- 
ness with the Association, and with their committee. 
This purpose leads me to say that my only wish is for 
the Association to have perfect acquaintance with my 
work and teachings and spirit. Of course, I know that 
there are a number of people whose present apparent 
temporal interest leads them to desire naturally to 
represent my deeds and my teachings and my spirit 
in unfavorable .colors. 

It is not my purpose to "fight" the matter in any 
sort of a spirit of antagonism or self-defense. But if 
it should come about that I should be deemed dis- 
qualified for membership in the Congregational min- 
istry, the reasons for my disqualifications must be spe- 
cifically stated and must be founded on established 
fact with the same care and in the same manner as 
my qualifications for the Congregational ministry were 
established nearly twenty years ago. I think you will 
agree with me, that the case is more than merely a 
personal question, as to what the Denomination may 
most conveniently do with me. There arise some- 
times occasions when issues are to be thought out and 
decided which reach far beyond the question as to 
how a troublesome problem may be gotten rid !of in 
the easiest way. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 51 

• - If th.ere does not seem likely to be any occasion 
soon when I may meet the Committee, perhaps I shall 
come over some day and talk the matter over with 
you at your convenience. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Wallace M. Short. 



The meeting of the business (or advisory) 
committee was finally arranged for February 
14, 1916, at Sheldon. To this committee I read 
the following letter: 

Sioux City, Iowa, Feb. 14, 1916. 

To the Advisory Committee of the Sioux Association 
of Congregational Churches and Ministers. 

Dear Brethren: — 

More than four months ago the Sioux Association, 
in session at Primghar, passed a resolution asking me 
to withdraw my name before the end of the then pres- 
ent session. The request was made without warning 
to me, and without previous consultation with me. It 
struck me at the itime very much as it would if my 
family circle had suddenly given me notice to change 
my name and consider myself no more a member of 
the family. 

The Association at Primghar very kindly acceded 
to my request for time to reflect on their action. This 
I have done, consulting meanwhile with a goodly num- 
ber of my ministerial brethren in different parts of the 
country. 

There has not been indicated to me any point in 
which I have been untrue to the duties and spirit of 
the Congregational fellowship, unless it be that I am 



52 CORRESPONDENCE. 

compelled to believe that the majority of Congre- 
gational ministers and members are at the present time 
in error in their judgment as to the ultimate results 
of certain efforts now in vogue in the name of tem- 
perance, and that I have ventured to speak and vote 
openly and frankly as I believe. This I hold to be the 
inevitable duty of a minister of Jesus Christ. 

I find in my heart one ruling passion and pur- 
pose — to speak the principles and truth of God's wis- 
dom and love ; and to apply these, so far as it shall be 
my lot to do so, in sympathy and fairness toward all 
human beings. 

There is, therefore, but one answer possible for 
me to give to the request of the Sioux Association : I 
am conscious of having "lived before God in all good 
conscience until this, day." If I should accede to the 
request of the Association, I should by that act wrong 
my family and my friends, and transgress the plain 
dictates of my own conscience by tacitly confessing 
guilt where I know none; and should cast discredit on 
the Congregational denomination throughout the coun- 
try by giving to the public the impression that its 
fellowship is founded on agreement of opinion instead 
of on intellectual and spiritual qualifications of char- 
acter. I have done that which I believed to be right 
and spoken that which I believed to be true. My con- 
victions are as in God's sight, and remain unshaken. 

Very sincerely, 

Wallace M. Short. 



I was with the committee from three un- 
til eight o'clock. When I left the committee, 
they assured me that the registrar would re- 
port to me the results of their deliberations. 






CORRESPONDENCE. 53 

Weeks passed and I heard no word. Fin- 
ally I wrote to the registrar, and received re- 
ply that the committee could not give final 
form to their report until they should get to- 
gether at Sibley for the spring meeting of the 
Sioux Association, which was to be held April 
11-13. 



The Sibley meeting was to begin Tues- 
day evening. I wrote the pastor at Sibley that 
I would arrive about 2:00 p. m., Wednesday. 
The train was a few minutes late, and when I 
reached the church the business session was 
awaiting my arrival to take up my case. Im- 
mediately the following report was read, and 
its adoption moved: 

Your committe finds that Wallace M. Short has 
continually lent his assistance to the support of the 
legalized liquor traffic, by making campaign speeches 
in its defense, by permitting his speeches to be used as 
campaign literature by state and national liquor or- 
ganizations, by being a member, of a bartenders' as- 
sociation, by being a personal user of liquor, which ac- 
tions are contrary to the declarations of the National 
Council of Congregational Churches as proclaimed at 
Kansas City in 1913, and at New Haven in 1915, and 
the Iowa State Conference in 1914; and which we deem 
contrary to the convictions, and detrimental to the 
interests of Sioux Association of Congregational 
Churches and Ministers. 

We, therefore, as your committee recommend that 
the Association withdraw from Wallace M. Short the 



54 CORRESPONDENCE. 

privileges of the fellowship of Sioux Association of 

Congregation Churches and Ministers." 

(Signed) Charts E. Tower, Sioux City, 
J. E. McCi^AiN, Sheldon, 
J. E. Hodden, Newell, 
J. E. BrERETON, Emmetsburg. 

A rather stormy and dramatic meeting of 
nearly two hours followed. Mr. Thrush pre- 
sented a minority report which was voted 
down. The majority report was finally adopt- 
ed. I at once requested a mutual council. My 
request was granted, and the business com- 
mittee was instructed to act for the Associa- 
tion, and in cooperation with me, in planning 
for and carrying through this mutual council. 

On April 17, I wrote Mr. Thrush some 
suggestions with reference to the proposed 
council. From Mr. Thrush's reply I quote: 

I hardly think that I should serve on the committee 
as I was inot in harmony with the Association in its 
action. I can hardly be warranted in appearing before 
a Council in defense of something which I opposed as 
ill-advised. 

I wrote Mr. Thrush as follows: 

April 24, 1916. 
Rev. J. O. Thrush, 

Spencer, Iowa. 
My Dear Brother: — 

Your letter of April 21st, in which you suggest 
your wish to withdraw from membership in the Ad- 
visory Committee of the Sioux Association is before 



CORRESPONDENCE. 55 

me. I trust that you may come to feel that the course 
of wisdom is for you to continue upon the Committee 
and take your part in its counsels and planning. 

So far as I am able to judge myself, I have but one 
purpose in claiming my right to a dignified hearing, 
and that purpose is to bring all aspects of our problem 
frankly to the light and to obtain a truly judicial de- 
cision upon the matters at issue, so far as our Con- 
gregational denomination is able to render such a de- 
cision. 

I have heard of cases in which a minister had 
so transgressed the laws of moral conduct that it might 
appear a gracious thing for his Association to per- 
mit him quietly to withdraw without dragging his 
transgressions out to the public gaze. You must dis- 
tinctly bear in mind that this is not a case of that kind. 
This is a case in which the accused seems to be al- 
most the only member of the Association who is de- 
sirous of having every aspect of the matter come clear- 
ly to the light. 

I sometimes fear, as I watch the procedure of the 
Sioux Association, that before the case is through the 
Sioux Association may put itself on record in such way 
that it will be the party that will shrink from having 
its conduct come to the light. As I review the history 
of the case, as fairly as I am able, up to the present 
point, I am not able to think that the Association has 
followed a very dignified or orderly procedure. 

Briefly stated, is not the history of the case about 
this? At Primghar the chairman of the Business Com- 
mittee read, wholly without consultation with me or 
previous warning, a resolution asking me to resign 
from the Association before the close of the Primghar 
session. When some member of the Association asked 
the chairman of the Committee what the charges were 



56 CORRESPONDENCE. 

against me, saying that this was to him like a bolt 
out of a clear sky, the chairman on being pressed re- 
plied hesitatingly that "the facts are too sickening and 
disgusting to talk about." I asked for time to con- 
sider the matter, and my request was granted, only 
two men voting at all. 

Four months later I met with the Committee at 
Sheldon, the chairman of the committee not being in 
attendance. We were together from three o'clock until 
eight. I took with me to the meeting of the committee 
a carefully prepared paper which I might have read 
in thirty minutes and in which I undertook to recount 
as fully and truthfully as I could the history of my 
course relative to the charges against me which I had 
gathered from the conversation of the brethren. The 
Committee said it did not wish to hear my statement, 
and therefore I did not read ,it. The conversation of 
the afternoon turned partly upon methods of proced- 
ure, and partly upon the temperance question, the real 
gist of the talk being that the brethren hoped I might 
see my way to adopt the prohibition ground for the 
promotion of temperance. I tried to make it clear that 
I did not regard myself as in any way on trial before 
the Committee, nor before anybody until some def- 
inite charges had been made against me to which I 
might speak in my own behalf. On leaving the Com- 
mittee at eight o'clock, I was assured that I should re- 
ceive through the Registrar a report of the delibera- 
tions of the Committee. 

I received no report until I heard it read by the 
chairman of the Business Committee on Wednesday 
afternoon at Sibley and heard its adoption moved and 
seconded. The report was intended, as I understand 
Congregational usage, to annul my ministerial stand- 
ing. When I raised the question of my right to be 



CORRESPONDENCE. 57 

heard in answer to the charges contained in the report, 
the Pastor of the First Congregational Church in 
Sioux City moved that I be given ten minutes then 
and there, and the motion was carried. When I arose 
to speak I undertook to do only one thing — to make it 
clear that I had not had a hearing and that I desired 
to be heard, and that I had no thought of undertaking 
to answer the charges in ten minutes at that time. 

Is not that a fair and truthful statement of the 
things which the Sioux Association has done in this 
matter? I have no wish whatever to prejudge the 
matter by claiming that I have the right to ministerial 
standing in the Congregational denomination. That is 
a matter that I wish the denomination in some orderly 
and decent way to pass judgment upon in such way 
that the denomination shall be satisfied with its judg- 
ment; then I also shall be satisfied. My call to the 
ministry is not from men but from above. However I 
desire to treat the matter of denominational standing 
in a way that I shall regard with approval in the days 
to come. I have hoped that my brethren in the min- 
istry might also pursue a course that shall look good 
to them in after days. 

It seems to me that I have clear reasons for call- 
ing attention to the fact that some forces back of the 
membership of the Sioux Association are exercising 
influence to bring the matter to a crisis without giving 
me a chance to speak for myself or have anyone speak 
for me. For instance, I was informed by yourself, 
and also by the Registrar, that it was the intention of 
the Advisory Committee to present a report which 
should not at present annul my ministerial standing, 
but that at the very last, to use as nearly as I remem- 
ber them the words in which the fact was conveyed to 
me, "Matters were brought to light in the committee 



58 CORRESPONDENCE. 

which changed the situation materially, and resulted 
in the report to expel me at once." When I indicated 
that the facts which had such influence with the com- 
mittee might be of interest to me, you told me that 
it would not be proper for you to say what the facts 
were. The Registrar said in substance the same thing 
to me. I confess that I felt real surprise to discover 
that facts upon which hinged the question of a man's 
public expulsion from the ministry in the Congrega- 
tional denomination might be brought to light in a 
committee meeting and neither the accused, nor the 
Association that voted on the accusation, ever know 
what the facts were. 

I have conjectures as to what happened. I shall 
have no hesitancy, if it shall become necessary, to give 
public expression to my conjectures, together with my 
reasons. 

I confess, my dear brother, that I feel somewhat 
humiliated that such a course of procedure can be 
followed by men who boast of a Congregational heri- 
tage. I had the honor when in Yale Theological 
school to help organize, at the suggestion of Prof. 
Barstow, "The Leonard Bacon Debating Club," honor- 
ing thus in our name a man who was distinguished 
for his readiness and ability to bring to light great 
questions on the floor of open discussion. I have read 
often with a thrill of purpose the declaration of Dr. 
George A. Gordon in his Yale lectures, that a great 
tradition of power has descended from the Congre- 
gational ministry of New England. 

I cannot but wonder how we men are to acquit 
ourselves worthily, in view of our denominational 
traditions, unless we cultivate the habit of standing 
up squarely to the great questions which agitate the 
public mind and conscience. I am really not so much 



CORRESPONDENCE. 59 

concerned about my ministerial standing in the As- 
sociation, as I am that I at least, according to the 
faculties and power which God has given me, should 
acquit myself in such way that I may enter sometime 
the fellowship of these heroes of old without the blush 
of shame. I have no apologies to make to the Sioux 
Association for the course which I have pursued in 
the teachings of temperance. I do have a faith and 
a conviction to state. If I may not give expression 
to my faith and conviction within the fellowship of the 
denomination, I am perfectly willing to sever my con- 
nections with the denomination, and to give expres- 
sion to my faith and conviction on the credentials 
alone which the human soul bears from the Power 
above. But I purpose that all things pertaining to 
this matter shall ; come to light. 

The Sioux Association has charged me with being 
a member of the Bartenders' Union. I wonder if there 
is a single member of the Association .who could tell 
with even approximate truthfulness what the incident 
was which occurred seven years ago in Kansas City 
and which gave to me the notoriety in the minds of 
my brethren of belonging to the Bartenders' Union. I 
am accused of preaching sermons which are used as 
campaign literature by the liquor dealers. I wonder 
how far the brethren would like to press that issue, 
when they come to face the fact that the campaign 
literature of the liquor dealers includes great masses of 
quotations from men of both church and state the 
latchet of whose shoes I should not consider myself 
worthy to stoop down and unloose. I might mention 
in a similar way the other charges, with the question 
who there is in the Sioux Association that would be 
willing to state the charge before any intelligent body 
of people, and give his reasons for it. 



6o CORRESPONDENCE. 

I have endeavored here to go into the matter 
only far enough to indicate something of what I shall 
have to say, and to ask you frankly whether the state- 
ment which I have here made is not fair. 

Do not you and I and all of our brethren need to 
face this matter openly and do whatever hard think- 
ing is necessary, if for nothing else, at least in order 
that our own minds and spirits may be disciplined so 
far as possible into some likeness of the mind and 
spjrit of the denominational ancestry whom we delight 
to honor? I venture to think that the question before 
us is altogether larger than the mere matter of getting 
rid of a troublesome problem the easiest way. You 
speak of the regret with which you view this whole 
affair. I am not able to view it with regret at all. 
Somehow the conviction is borne in upon me that 
the hand of God is upon us to train us for bigger and 
better things than we are doing. My wife remarked 
very cheerfully the other day that "God gives us hard 
tasks in order to see what we are made of." Then I 
turned her thought just a little to say that "God gives 
us hard tasks in order to make something of us." 
Whatever God has done for me that I value most, he 
has done through the discipline of hard tasks. 
Fraternally yours, 

Wallace; M. Short." 

Next day Mr. Thrush wrote: 

Dear Brother Short: — 

Your letter of yesterday has just reached me and 
received the careful reading that it deserved. I thank 
you for your frank way of stating your position. I 
feel that I am no longer associated with the Advisory 
Committee as I have resigned. I wish now to make a 
little statement to you regarding some things about 






CORRESPONDENCE. 61 

the whole matter. Probably you will recall that I was 
not at the Primghar meeting. My first connection 
with the matter was at Sheldon. When the Committee 
went into private conference, there was a difference of 
opinion. I took the position, and received good sup- 
port from one member, that we should not advise to 
drop your name from the roll. Finally I was asked 
what would satisfy me, or rather how far I would go 
in the matter, and my reply was that as a compromise 
I would be willing that we state as strongly as possible 
our prohibition views, and point out how your views 
and attitude on the matter were detrimental to the 
best interests of the temperance campaign. It was 
finally decided that we would follow that general plan 
and Brereton was appointed to draft the report and 
send it around the circle for corrections and additions. 
His report reached me first. I made one or two sug- 
gestions, and added my hearty approval to the docu- 
ment as a whole. It went from me to the other three 
and was returned to Brereton. One member wrote 
practically a new report. Then the whole matter was 
started around the circle for a second time. I gave my 
hearty approval for the second time to the first copy; 
but when it returned to Brereton, it was very evident 
that there would need to be another meeting of the 
Committee and so such meeting was appointed for 
Tuesday of the week in which the Association was to 
meet at Sibley. When we came together the differ- 
ence between us was most pronounced. We contended 
all afternoon. I held out for the report that was 
first sent around, and which represented the general 
agreement at Sheldon. Very late in the afternoon, 
two men, one a member of the committee and the other 
a man who had been in and out during the afternoon 



62 CORRESPONDENCE. 

listening to us, went and took legal advice as to the 
rights of the Association in the matter, and returned 
with a great deal of enthusiasm telling us that if we 
thought there was ground for dropping your name, 
we had a perfect right to do so, and there could be no 
legal action against us. This had a marvelous effect 
on some of the committee and right J;here began to 
draft the majority report. I took a very active part 
in drafting that report. As drafted at that time there 
were two charges against you viz. — that you confessed 
the use of liquors and second that you gave assistance 
to the wets against the cause of prohibition. I in- 
sisted that we put the word "withhold" instead of 
the word "withdraw" fellowship. When asked if I 
would sign the report, I remarked something like this, 
"Perhaps, but I must sleep over it first." The next 
morning the report was handed to me, with the addi- 
tional charges and the word "withdraw." I handed 
it back with the statement that I would not sign it. 
I made no explanations for I did not think that any 
were necessary. As the .report had been completely 
changed and things put in it that I could not state 
positively were true, I felt that I could not commit 
myself to them. The rest you know. I am very 
sorry that I permitted myself to become so angry at 
Sibley but I felt that the provocation was very great. 

"I wish that I felt that it were possible for me to 
remain on the committee but I differ so radically from 
the others that it would be very much out of place for 
me to have any part in the council. I want you to 
distinctly understand that the minority report repre- 
sented the extreme of what I thought we should do. 
It probably sounded very severe to you. I recognize 
that it was severe. I had made a fight to retain you 



CORRESPONDENCE. 63 

in the Association and compromised on such state- 
ments as were contained in that report. 

I hope the whole matter will result in some way 
in doing good. 

Thanking you for your frank letter, and I have 
tried to meet it* with an equally frank statement, I am, 
Fraternally yours, 

(Signed) John O. Thrush. 
April 25, 1916. 

Another letter to Mr. Thrush: 

Sioux City, Iowa, May 1, 1916. 
Rev. J. O. Thrush, 

Spencer, Iowa. 

My dear Brother : — The kindly and sincere response 
which you made to my last letter encourages me to give 
expression a little further to some matters that are in my 
mind. 

There are three distinct and separate influences that 
bear upon the problem which the Sioux Association is 
facing with reference to my attitude. (1) There is the 
influence of the Anti-Saloon League. (2) There is the 
influence of certain persons in Sioux City. (3) There 
is the mind of the Sioux Association. 

The attitude of the Anti-Saloon League is known 
beforehand. Its attitude I shall not here discuss. It is, 
in this part of the country, a most powerful political 
agent. I do not think any minister in certain of our 
Protestant denominations has in recent years ventured to 
express himself upon the temperance question in any 
other way than that prescribed by the Anti- Saloon 
League ; if he has he has lost his ministerial head. While 
it has been intimated a number of times, and especially 
bv the chairman of the Business Committee both at 



64 CORRESPONDENCE. 

Primghar and at Sibley, that there is a great mass of evi- 
dence against me, and while I have given to members of 
the committee such opportunity as I might, short of a 
peremptory demand, to indicate to me something of the 
nature and the sources of this evidence, I have received 
no light upon the matter except that one member of the 
committee named to me one or more superintendents and 
officials of the Anti-Saloon League. 

As to the second influence, I have not heretofore 
mentioned it, hoping it might not be necessary to do so. 
But developments at Sibley made it evident that I can no 
longer respect myself as one who tries to be an independ- 
ent minister of the truth and grace of Jesus Christ, unless 
I do take note of this influence. 

A few days before the meeting at Sibley I wrote to 
the minister of the Church there to let him know that I 
would be present, and to tell him just when I should ar- 
rive. There went to Sibley on the same train with me 
a business man who is a member of the First Congrega- 
tional Church in Sioux City, and also a minister who is not 
in the active pastorate but who is a member of the First 
Congregational Church. [The business man is senior 
deacon of the Church, and also president of the Y. M. C. 
A. The minister is secretary of the Y. M. C. A.] These 
two men, and the Pastor of the First Congregational 
Church and his delegate, all sat together at Sibley during 
the business session at which my case was discussed. Of 
course the business man above mentioned was not a voter, 
but he had with him three members of his church who 
had votes, and these three together with one or two voters 
from another Church near to Sioux City all voted to- 
gether every time, and were almost if not altogether 
the only persons who voted against my request for a 
hearing before a mutual council. Then this business 






CORRESPONDENCE. 65 

man and his delegates all went home, not remaining 
for the further sessions of the Association. 

Against this business man I feel no malice, and for 
him I have no denunciations. I use him simply as the 
typical and leading figure in a situation which I cannot 
rightly ignore unless I mean to renounce wholly the right 
and dignity of the ministry. I would unhesitatingly select 
him as one of the highest types of the faithful husband 
and father, and a man of highest personal morality and 
legal honesty and business integrity. I doubt if he has any 
sense of the corruption and brutality that lurk under- 
neath his political manipulations in civic and ecclesiastical 
politics. He needs not so much to be denounced as to be 
taught. And no minister can teach him unless that min- 
ister has the patience and purpose to win the power suc- 
cessfully to challenge his methods in the open light. I 
do not blame him any more for his methods than I blame 
the minister or the ministry which declines the great task 
of winning the intellectual and spiritual power to cope 
successfully with the brutality of mere material force. 

A few years ago I lunched with him one noon at the Y. 
M. C. A. on the day when he was chairman of the Wood- 
bury County Republican Convention. During six years 
of intimate acquaintance with him I have seldom known 
him to be communicative as to the real thoughts and emo- 
tions within. He was unusually communicative on that 
occasion, and expressed a boyish glee over the things 
which were being done in the convention under his direc- 
tion. He told me that he supposed the papers the next 
day would probably denounce the methods as those of the 
steam roller. But he said it was great fun, especially if 
you win. His own hand in such affairs is not often visi- 
ble except to the experienced eye. I never before saw him 
show his hand so evidently as he did in this flying trip to 
Sibley. He surely would never have done that thing if 



66 CORRESPONDENCE. 

he had not been absolutely confident beforehand that he 
was going to accomplish my final elimination from the 
Sioux City problem. Perhaps I should say here that when 
in his home I handed him my resignation from the pas- 
torate of the First Congregational Church two years ago 
I did so only after I had made it perfectly clear to him that 
I meant to start independent work in Sioux City, and he 
had fully assented to my right to do so. 

It was at about the time of the Woodbury County Re- 
publican Convention which I have above mentioned that 
one of the Sioux City papers called attention to the fact 
that delegates were sent to the state convention to repre- 
sent some precincts of Woodbury County in which said 
delegates had been turned down by their home con- 
stituency by an adverse vote as high as 38 to 1. 

When ;the break came in the First Congregational 
Church in Sioux City two years ago, it came to a majority 
of the people like a bolt out of a clear sky. During the 
month of May, 1914, I saw forces rounded up, with this 
same man as their spokesman and chairman, and meth- 
ods pursued, which were a marvel and a dismay to me 
even though I had participated in bitter political cam- 
paigns more than once in Kansas City and had seen 
political intrigue from the inside. The record of six 
weeks in the First Congregational Church in Sioux 
City in the spring of 1914 can surely be described as 
nothing less than brutal. I have the records of it all. 
I shall be glad if it may never be necessary for me to 
produce them. But I cannot see any way in which I 
can maintain my right in my own conscience to call 
myself a minister of Jesus Christ if I passively and 
w r eakly yield to such influences. 

In this connection it is surely, to say the least, an 
anomaly that the pastor of the First Congregational 
Church in Sioux City should be a member of the Business 



CORRESPONDENCE. 67 

Committee of the Sioux Association to deal with my case 
and should be upon that committee the aggressive factor 
against me. 

I realize that the mention of this second factor opens 
the door into a large field. But when Providence brings 
a man face to face with a situation, how is a man to save 
his own soul unless he undertakes by the power and grace 
of God to do two things : ( 1 ) Stand in his place and 
play the part of a man if he is able, (2) learn how to have 
the peace and grace of God in his own heart in whatever 
difficult or trying situations it may be necessary for him 
to meet. 

The third factor — the mind of the Sioux Association 
— ought to be the determining factor. It is for this real 
mind of the Sioux Association that I have been listening. 
One cannot help wondering sometimes whether between 
the political dominance of the Anti- Saloon League, and 
the power of the second factor which I have mentioned 
— the man whose great wealth enables him by a wink of 
the eye to set a hundred servants to doing his bidding — 
the Sioux Association really knows its own mind. Your 
own independent stand, and frank statement, have been 
delightfully refreshing to me. It seems to make little dif- 
ference with me whether a man agrees with me or not, if 
only the man stands in his own independent right for 
something which his reason and conscience approve. It 
is this independent manhood which I have supposed fur- 
nishes the basis of ministerial fellowship in the Congrega- 
tional denomination. I am hoping to find that this is the 
case. 

When I can find the real mind of the Sioux Asso- 
ciation, or of the Congregational denomination, then I 
shall be satisfied. I am somehow impelled to think that 
in the search for this independent mind and conscience of 



68 CORRESPONDENCE. 

Congregationalism, I may be able to render some slight 
service both to the denomination and to religion. 

Fraternally yours, 

(Signed) Wallace M. Short. 

Mr. Thrush having referred the matter to 
Mr. Brereton, the Registrar, and Mr. Brereton 
having referred it to Mr. Holden, the chair- 
man of the business committee, there passed 
between myself and Mr. Holden a series of let- 
ters during the month of May. Copies of his 
letters and mine I sent to ten or fifteen lead- 
ing men of the denomination, in order that we 
might have the counsel of able minds to assist 
in our planning. Among those to whom I sent 
the copies was the Rev. William E. Barton, 
D.D., who is a recognized authority on matters 
of ecclesiastical and denominational usage. 

On May 24, Mr. Holden wrote as follows: 

Rev. W. M. Short. 

Dear Sir and Brother : — I am in receipt of yours of 
today and hasten to answer. 

From correspondence with members of the com- 
mittee there seems to be unanimity of opinion on three 
things at least, (i) That the council cannot profitably 
be held in Sioux City. (2) That there should be some 
method of limiting the time of the council. (3) That 
the committee cannot see their way to pay any expenses 
unless authorized to do so by the Association. 

There is a fourth item which may arise and has been 
suggested by two of the brethren — the reducing of the 
number to be invited to the council. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 69 

These are the difficulties in the way at present and 
unless someone has a reasonable solution of them, I see no 
use in even calling the committee together. 

The academics of the situation as presented by Dr. 
Barton are correct, but I doubt if he is fully informed of 
the concrete example. 

I am sincerely yours, 

(Signed) Jas. E. Holden. 

To this letter I replied: 

May 25, 1916. 
Rev. Jas. E. Holden, 

Newell, Iowa. 

Dear Brother : — Your letter of yesterday came a few 
hours ago, and has received careful attention. I have not 
as yet been able to find in it any suggestion for progress 
of any kind. May I say frankly that I do not feel satis- 
fied with your idea that there may be "no use in even 
calling the committee together." You will recall that 
the Association at Sibley authorized the Committee to 
devise with me, and carry out a course of action. I 
have no right to be satisfied with mere tactics of delay. 

Your official position as chairman of the Advisory 
Committee has placed you where the initiative in behalf 
of the Association has devolved upon you. You have not 
held back at any time when action was required to adver- 
tise me to the public as a man unworthy of the fellowship 
of the Christian ministry. Have I not ground for feel- 
ing that your last letter brings us to a critical point of our 
planning for the council? 

You will recall that at Primghar last autumn you 
read the resolutions calling upon me to resign at once from 
the Association; that you spoke no word to me before- 
hand regarding that resolution ; that when some member 



;o CORRESPONDENCE. 

at that time asked the reason for the resolution, and re- 
peated his request, you replied in a low tone that the mat- 
ter was too sickening and disgusting to talk about. When 
I approached you a few minutes later to talk upon the 
matter you excused yourself on the plea of a pressing en- 
gagement. 

You remember that when you called the committee 
to meet me at Sheldon in February, you remained away 
from the meeting. 

Then at Sibley you read the majority report — to with- 
draw fellowship from me — having never indicated to me 
the nature of the report, nor conferred with me in any 
way. You moved the adoption of that report, and voted 
for it, remarking vaguely, during the discussion, that 
there was a great mass of evidence against me. Im- 
mediately after that business session you took train for 
home on the plea, as reported to me by a brother minis- 
ter, that you were ill. 

I had much rather be wronged than to be unjust, if 
for no higher reason, at least for this, that I expect the^e 
records to be read by minds who will not be prejudiced 
in my favor, and by a few of those who come after me. 

Providence places me in a position where I am not at 
liberty to let this matter slip along and go by default, even 
though that may sometimes appeal to one as the easier 
way. I came into the Sioux Association six years ago 
with a clean reputation. Have you not given me abundant 
reason for saying plainly that the path of duty has be- 
come clear to me, and that this issue must be met square- 
ly. There is no honorable way surely but for you to be 
as resourceful in helping to a fair hearing as you have 
been in bringing charges and keeping away from the 
opportunity or necessity of stating them and letting the 
case rest on its merits. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 71 

Any arrangement will satisfy me that shall result in 
a council which shall appear fairly representative of the 
denomination. I have no right to consent to anything 
less than this. 

In my judgment it is time for you and me to come 
face to face and talk this matter over. I believe it is time 
for a meeting of the committee. If you are able to suggest 
some course of action that shall look toward progress, I 
shall gladly act with you. Unless some such course shall 
be presented, I shall on next Tuesday send copies of your 
letter, and of this letter, to the men who have so kindly 
helped me with their suggestions. Seeking their counsel 
and the help of God I shall persevere until all is brought 
to the light. 

Very sincerely, 

Waixacs M. Short. 



Mr. Holden called the committee to meet 
at Sheldon on May 31. My wife went with me 
to the meeting. Messrs. Holden, Brereton, 
and McClain of the committee were present. 

The next day I wrote the following note 
regarding this meeting: 

The Committee thought a small council from the 
vicinage would answer the purpose. I stood for a council 
representative of the denomination. Finally we came to 
agreement at all essential points except finance. The 
committee decided to take by mail a referendum vote of 
the ministers of the Association to learn whether they 
approve of bearing the one or two hundred dollars ex- 
pense that would fall upon the Association. Each mem- 
ber of the committee had been impressed that the council 
could not be held in Sioux City. They felt that Fort 



72 CORRESPONDENCE. 

Dodge, 135 miles distant, might do. This location would 
add a little to the expense, and a great deal to the in- 
convenience. 

We were together for eight hours. Tempers got 
ruffled sometimes. There were occasional stretches of 
fine good fellowship. On the whole, it was to me the best 
experience of ministerial fellowship I have had in the 
Sioux Association. 

All too often our fellowship is merely a sentimental 
circle holding hands and singing about "the tie that binds," 
when in fact the tie is not strong enough to stand the 
strain of the jolt of an idea. 

At ten o'clock last evening I went to my room at the 
hotel to thank God that he has given me the spirit to stand 
my ground when reason and conscience give the com- 
mand, rather than to follow the easy course of dishonor- 
able safety. If only we ministers could have at least one 
day's exercise a week like we had yesterday, what splen- 
did fellows some of our timid and acquiescent men would 
come to be! And how the influence and usefulness of 
the ministry would advance ! Last night I liked those fel- 
lows better than I ever liked them before. 

Two or three facts seemed to me especial- 
ly significant in this last meeting of the com- 
mittee: 

There was utter confusion in the minds of 
the committee as to the ultimate significance 
of the action they were proposing to take in my 
case. One member insisted that the action of 
the Association would not affect my legal 
status as a minister; but would relieve the 
Sioux Association of responsibility for my 
teachings. x j 



CORRESPONDENCE. 73 

Each of the members of the committee 
would hark back every few minutes to the 
argument, that there was no occasion for mak- 
ing the proposed council of national scope, be- 
cause this event was merely a local affair that 
was of no concern to anybody outside the 
Sioux Association. Yet the registrar had re- 
ceived that very morning a letter from the 
Iow T a State Congregational secretary inquiring 
whether my name should not be dropped from 
the roll of the forthcoming national Congrega- 
tional Year Book. 

When we came to the selection of mem- 
bers of the proposed council the committee 
selected some men who have given months of 
their time in the last few years to campaign 
speaking for the Anti-Saloon League. I made 
no objection to these selections. 

But when I named a man of the very high- 
est standing in church and state who happens 
to be known as not a prohibitionist, the com- 
mittee acted as if I had thrown a moral leper 
into their laps. Hands were thrown up; wry 
faces were made; the clamor came from every 
side — "O let us be fair; let us be fair; we want 
men of character on the council." 

The referendum of the ministers of the 
Association, on the matter of sharing the ex- 
pense of a representative council, returned an 
overwhelming majority against bearing any 
expense; and of the committee, four members 
voted against any expense at all, and one mem- 
ber voted for expense not to exceed a hundred 



74 CORRESPONDENCE. 

dollars. (Rev. Joseph Steele of Lemars had 
been appointed by the committee to fill the 
vacancy created by the resignation of Mr. 
Thrush.) 

It seems to me to be clearly my duty -to 
carry the matter to the decision of a represent- 
ative Council of the Denomination. I shall 
at the autumn meeting of the Sioux Associa- 
tion renew my request for a mutual Council, 
and shall be prepared to take whatever further 
action may appear necessary. 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

"Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and 
prayed." — Browning. 

How the human heart hungers and thirsts 
and agonizes for more love in this old world 
of ours! 

Hate and fear are the deep and compre- 
hensive sources of the world's distress and 
misery. He who has sounded the dark depths 
of these evil passions knows the place of tor- 
ments, and knows that it is not afar off in 
time or space, but its place is in the heart of 
man. 

Good-will and faith are the eternal sources 
of happiness. And happiness, wherever found, 
is heaven. 

How very simple this prescription for 
happiness ! But we can reduce it to yet simpler 
terms, and that on the authority both of per- 
sonal experience and of the teachings of the 
poets and prophets of all the ages. "Perfect 
love," says the apostle John, "casteth out 
fear." Therefore he who hath love hath set 
his heart free already from both hate and fear, 
the perennial sources of torments (I "John 
4:18). 



76 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

Of all the things that abide, love is the 
greatest, says Paul; and next to this is faith. 
In fact, just as fear takes its flight when love 
enters, so faith, which is the opposite of fear, 
comes into the soul when love comes in. Hate 
and fear are inseparable twins. Love and faith 
always walk hand in hand. 

The first command of Jesus was love; 
and the second was like unto the first — love. 

To Henry Drummond the "greatest thing 
in the world" is love. 

For Robert Browning the same is true: 

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 

And hope and fear, * * * 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love." 

Moreover, the prescription for making 
heaven is not only simple, it is inexpensive. 
Yea, it may be had without money and with- 
out price, says Isaiah. 

Says Lowell: 

" 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 
'T is only God may be had for the asking." 

Why, then, O why does the human heart 
go on agonizing in strife and bitterness and 
fear from age to age? That is the urgent ques- 
tion for every human soul in every generation. 
He who answers that question solves the ages- 
old, yet the ever new, riddle of the human 
spirit. 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 77 

The question can be answered. The rid- 
dle can be solved. Any one who desires can 
solve it. The only condition is, that he shall 
desire the answer supremely — more than he 
desires any or all other things. It is the pearl 
of great price, says Jesus, which, when a man 
hath found it, he goeth and selleth all that he 
hath and buyeth it. 

The difficulty always is the same — that 
man tries to find happiness in his own way, 
instead of seeking it in God's way. 

In the things of the material world people 
are wiser. In these matters men study long 
and arduously to find God's way. They con- 
sult all the sciences to discover nature's way — 
which is God's way — to grow the best corn, 
or to build a successful electrical engine, or to 
construct a safe and beautiful building. In 
these things that pertain to the material life, 
the children of this world are quite w r ise, says 
Jesus. 

But in the matters of the human spirit, 
which require a deeper kind of insight, he tells 
us that "the children of light" stumble, and 
grope in confusion. In the questions upon 
which hinge human misery and happiness peo- 
ple follow the impulses and instincts of the 
lower nature, and try to find happiness in 
these. 

Yes, the prescription of happiness is 
simple — love, good-will. It is inexpensive. It 
costs no money, because money cannot buy it. 



78 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

But it is not easy. It costs the price of lifting 
every ■man out of the control of the "natural" 
instincts and passions of his lower nature, and 
into the control of the spiritual and godlike 
faculties that lie sleeping in every soul, wait- 
ing to be awakened and disciplined into power. 
It costs the price of all that long history of the 
invisible battles by which the spirit of man 
wins freedom from the domination of the god 
of this world, and by which he attains unto 
the intelligent and glad obedience of fellow- 
ship with the living God. 

God rules this world. Man is always for- 
getting that fact, and dropping back into the 
false conceit that the world is ruled by men. 

God rules the world, and one of his chief 
laws is the law of love. And every law of 
God has penalties attached. If you violate 
God's laws in the physical world, you suffer 
disaster, disease, death. He who violates 
God's laws for man's spirit suffers also, im u 
mediately and surely. 

Jesus announced one of the laws of God: 
Thou shalt love God and thy neighbor. The 
nations of Europe violate that law, and they 
fall at once into suspicion and hate with all the 
consequent misery; and from suspicion and 
hate they soon plunge into the abyss of bloody 
conflict. 

Jesus did not create the law of love; he 
merely saw it and proclaimed it. It has been 
God's law from the beginning of time. Amer- 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 79 

ican employers and workmen violate that law, 
and suspicion takes the place of confidence, 
envy drives out good-will; and soon there 
breaks out industrial war with all its long train 
of consequences. 

God's spiritual laws are not mere "scraps 
of paper." They enforce their own penalties as 
surely as his laws of the physical world. The 
law of gravitation enforces its own penalties — 
violate it, and you fall to your death. God's 
law of love enforces its own penalties — violate 
it, and there come bitter hearts and hard faces 
and gray hairs and spirits grown old and de- 
crepit before their time. 

Why is it so difficult a matter for men 
to learn love? I will tell you. It is difficult 
for us poor mortals to learn love, because it is 
necessary that we should first grow out of 
the laws and habits of the animal life to which 
we are born, and that we should grow into the 
laws and habits of the spiritual life to which 
God belongs and toward which he beckons us. 

In the world of plants and animals there 
is a law in full force which the scientist calls, 
"the law of the survival of the fittest/' That 
law operates by competition and physical con- 
flict. This is the law of business also, being 
merely modified slightly in its form and re- 
fined somewhat in its visible workings. 

In the spiritual world also there is a law 
of the survival of the fittest. It is analogous 
to the law of survival in the physical world, 



80 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

but it operates from the opposite pole of hu- 
man experience. In the physical world those 
forms survive that adjust themselves best to 
physical environment. In the spiritual world, 
to which man is meant to rise, those persons 
survive that adjust themselves best to their 
spiritual environment, which is God. And 
God is love. 

I said that, in order to learn God's law of 
love, it is necessary for us first to grow out 
of the laws and habits of the animal life to 
which we are born, else we cannot see God's 
law of love. That is just what Paul told the 
world. He said that the "natural" or animal 
man cannot take in the things of God, because 
these things of God can be discerned only by 
the spiritual man, and to the natural man they 
are foolishness (I Cor. 2:14). 

Now it is not exactly correct to say that 
a man must grow out of the laws and habits of 
the animal life. One never grows out of these 
finally until he leaves the body and the phys- 
ical world behind. What one should do is to 
grow up into the spiritual world and into the 
experience of the living God, so that he sees 
the higher laws and the higher thoughts and 
ways of God, and makes these the controlling 
laws of his thought and conduct. It is in this 
way that the tree grows up above the sod, and 
makes the laws of the upper air and light the 
ruling laws of its being. Its roots beneath the 
sod come to their best only when the stately 
tree grows best toward the sky. But the upper 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 81 

tree is the reason why the roots exist at all, and 
above the laws of the roots down in the dark 
soil it follows the laws of the upper light — of 
sun and clouds and air. 

Neither is it wholly correct to say that we 
must grow out of the natural man into the 
spiritual man first, before we can discern 
spiritual things. The fact is that we grow up 
out of the natural man into the spiritual man 
step by step, so long as we live, provided we 
keep our spirits fresh and sensitive to God's in- 
spirations by obeying them swiftly day by day. 
The business of life is to grow up into God. 
This, said Jesus, is life eternal, to come to 
know God by growing up into the spiritual 
world (John 17:3). If we do this, we succeed 
with the great business of living. If we fail at 
this, though we should gain the whole world, 
we have failed beyond repair (Mark 8:36). 

Religion, therefore, is not a set of theories 
about God and man, which we call a creed, 
though creeds are sure to grow out of religion. 
Religion is a response of the spirit in man to 
the spirit of God that broods over man's life. 
It is the growing bond that binds the child to 
his Father. 

Religion, therefore, is not a system of 
habit and conduct. Religion produces its own 
appropriate habits and conduct, as the living 
tree grows its own appropriate branches and 
leaves, and adds to the landscape its own pe- 
culiar type of color and form. 



82 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

Because certain habits and forms of con- 
duct are the most visible things about a man, 
the subtlest foe of true religion has always 
been the tendency to identify these visible facts 
with religion itself, and to enforce them upon 
men, and suppose that thus we were enforcing 
religion upon men, when in fact we were only 
making men slaves to our laws, or revolution- 
ists against our laws. 

It was for the promotion of this visible, 
and therefore hollow, kind of religion that St. 
Paul was going to Damascus one dark day, 
when suddenly the day was made forever il- 
lustrious by the light of a higher way — ; the 
way of Jesus. And from that day forth the 
life of Paul was a great and noble battle for the 
higher way — God's way. We see him going 
onward, suffering persecutions from the god 
of the visible religion, bearing daily the 
cross of Jesus, growing clearer in his seeing, 
mightier in spirit, ruled more evidently by the 
God of love, until he vanishes from mortal 
sight on the radiant summits of the one kind 
of success for which God and men accord at 
last the crown of immortality. 

Paul in his vision and obedience and suf- 
fering and his brave heart gained the joy of 
true success — life. He became a living soul — 
how mightily alive! so that the pulses of his 
life are tingling still in the heart-throbs of 
humanity. 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 83 

It is life, more abundant life, higher and 
higher kinds of life — it is this, and this alone, 
that can satisfy the heart of man. 

" 'T is life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
O life, not death, for which we pant ; 
More life, and fuller, that I want." 

And life is in the living, growing spirit 
of man that has daily increasing power to 
know and understand and enjoy the spirit of 
the living God. And the living God is love. 
We know, then, what the world needs to 
make it happy. It needs life, spiritual life. 
That is what Jesus came to give — "I came that 
they might have life, and that they might have 
it more and more." (John 10:10). 

We know now what the church and the 
ministry and the Christian disciple exist for. 
They exist that they may be ever more and 
more alive with that kind of life that reaches 
and towers up toward the throne of the think- 
ing and living and loving God. 

We know what the church and the minis- 
ter and the Christian disciple are meant to do 
for the world. They are meant to be so full of 
this thinking and loving life that their light 
shall shine all over everything in this world and 
give a meaning and a power and a glory to life, 
so that life shall all seem so vastly worth while 
that men shall learn to rejoice even in sacri- 
fice and sorrow and in the cross of the Christ, 
because of the increasing power and joy of 



84 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

the higher and immortal kind of life that is 
filling their souls with the knowledge and 
power and love of the living and loving God. 

This is the real work, the great work of 
civilization and salvation. 

It cannot be done once for all; it must be 
done every day for every man and for every 
society and race of men. 

It requires the highest kind of power. — 
the invisible and almighty power to lift brutes 
into men, to carry worldlings up into sons 
of God. 

It can be done only by the highest kinds 
of insight and wisdom — the piercing eye to 
discern the principles and laws of the Creator 
by which he has ordained that the invisible 
spirit of man shall find health and life and 
growth. 

It requires the noblest species of courage 
known to man — the courage to follow God's 
way when all the unseeing clamor is calling 
for some plausible and easy way that looks 
good to eyes that are spiritually blind, but 
which is foolishness in the sight of God. 

To all these must be added the patience 
and grace of Jesus Christ. 

We see now the reason for the cross. It 
is that which Jesus suffers, in patience and 
courage and love and blessed joy, for those who 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 85 

do not see, and who exalt their personal wish 
and convenience into a creed, and their blind- 
ness into a religion. 

The cross of Christ stands at the center 
of all Christian teachings, and is seen in the 
experience of every higher kind of life. Jesus 
said that the cross must be the daily experience 
of every one who would be his disciple. Mr. 
Lincoln is described in Lowell's noble tribute 
as "dreading praise, not blame. " 

The hymn declares: 

"They joy who suffer most with him, 
They win who with him lose." 

If**!* m-m*? , ii^ii^jHii 

The disciple is not above his Master. It 
is enough for the disciple that he be as his 
Master. 

The cross is that which the parent, who 
sees, suffers for the child that does not yet 
see. The cross is that, and something more. 
It is that which the Christian, with spiritual 
eyes opened to see, suffers for children now 
grown into men and women who yet do not 
see, but who have worldly power and material 
influence which they put in the place of re- 
ligion, a form of godliness but lacking the 
power of the spiritual vision and life, a religion 
of the god of this world. 

But though the cross is the very symbol 
of discipleship, tipping the spires of the 
churches of Christendom, yet when it actually 
comes, and men begin to "say all manner of 



86 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

evil against you falsely/' the disciple is not 
unlikely to feel surprise, and perhaps offense, 
rather than the rejoicing and gladness which 
scripture teaches that he ought to feel. I once 
knew a veteran of the civil war who said that 
when after months of drilling as a new recruit, 
he suddenly found himself stationed, with his 
regiment, in an open field where the bullets 
were flying and men were falling, he felt that 
some one had blundered. But finally it dawn- 
ed upon his mind that it was for just such ex- 
periences that he had enlisted. 

It is only through many a baptism of fire 
that raw recruits become veterans. 

It is very easy for professed soldiers of 
Christ to mistake altogether the nature of the 
cross. I have known ministers who, when 
charged with inefficiency and intellectual 
anemia and spiritual blindness, have retreated 
with an injured and sanctimonious look, sup- 
posing that they were bearing the cross. They 
would do better to consider seriously whether 
the charges may be true. 

The business of the minister of Jesus 
Christ is to see and speak God's thoughts and 
God's ways. God's thoughts and ways are 
higher than man's thoughts and ways. Many 
men are indifferent, because God's thoughts 
and ways are beyond the reach of their ex- 
perience and their accustomed thinking. 
Other men regard God's thoughts and ways 
as foolish, because they find their own pleas- 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 87 

ures only in the sensuous and worldly exist- 
ence. Yet others hate God's thoughts and 
ways, because they have themselves erected 
a system of business and social prosperity into 
a religion, which has the form and external 
appearance of godliness, but which lacks the 
inner spirit and the power of genuineness. 
The religion of this latter sort of people is 
the religion of the god of this world. 

It is this religion of business prosperity 
and social ambition — this religion of the god 
of this world, — which is the subtlest, and also 
the bitterest foe of the religion of the living 
God of love. It is a subtle foe, because it 
possessess much of the outward appearance 
and form of religion. It is bitter, because in- 
evitably it feels in the spirit of Jesus a 
challenge and test of its own spirit — "if any 
man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none 
of his." The religion of the god of this world 
is bitter against the Christ and seeks to de- 
stroy him now just as in times past. The re- 
ligion of the god of this world desires the 
presence of the Christ as an ornament, but it 
wants him to keep still. The God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of all the 
people. But the god of the religion of busi- 
ness prosperity and social ambition is a 
limited god of the social and elect circle. 

It is the religion of the god of this world 
— the god of material substance and physical 
force — that deceives the eyes of his worship- 
pers, and that builds churches and crucifies 



88 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

the Christ, and that subsidizes ministers and 
saps their spiritual force and makes them 
afraid. 

Before the middle of the last century Dr. 
Lyman Beecher had said, "If in our haste to 
be rich and mighty, we outrun our literary 
and religious institutions, they will never over- 
take us; or only come up after the battle of 
liberty is fought and lost, as spoils to grace 
the victory, and as resources of inexorable des- 
potism for the perpetuity of our bondage." 

Does not the all-seeing God know that, in 
part at least, the condition against which Mr. 
Beecher lifted his warning voice has already 
come to pass? Would that we had a thousand 
Beechers who knew and dared to say the brave, 
true words that our religious society needs. 
Nothing but the tongue of flame can accom- 
plish God's work. And the tongue of flame is 
given only to those who dare to suffer with the 
Christ — to die with him, in order that they 
may live with him. 

Mr. Beecher goes on to say that, "It is 
not the impossibility of self-preservation which 
threatens us; nor is it the unwillingness of the 
nation to pay the price of the preservation, as 
she has paid the price of the purchase of our 
liberties. It is inattention and inconsidera- 
tion, protracted till the crisis is past, and the 
things which belong to our peace are hid from 
our eyes." 

It is the cowardice of a ministry that 
shrinks from open and honorable contest, and 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 89 

that lacks the mental and spiritual education 
and hardihood of the challenge and adventure 
of moral leadership, and that suffers the petty 
pains of insignificance instead of the manly 
pains of the cross of Christ — it is this that 
renders blind the eyes from which are hid the 
things that belong to our peace. 

My brother in the ministry, I beg you not 
to turn away from these words even though 
they may seem to you searching, or even harsh. 
I have seen some of you waive aside the 
criticisms of the magazines and the public 
press as if any criticism lodged against you 
must of course be merely wicked and vicious, 
the invention of evil men. 

Let me assure you that I am preaching 
these truths to myself first of all, as I realize 
how easily a man, with a certain kind of devo- 
tion, may give himself to the service of the re- 
ligious organization and become unconsciously 
the servant of the god of this world, bought 
and paid for, the original freshness and youth- 
ful virility of his intellectual promise and 
spiritual enthusiasm gone, himself now but as 
"spoils to grace the victory" of material pros- 
perity and force, a Samson, spiritually blinded, 
grinding at the mill of ecclesiastical machinery. 

Mr. Beecher, in the article above men- 
tioned, declares that our hope lies in a whole- 
some fear. By which he does not mean the 
craven fear of the god of this world, but the 
brave and noble fear of the living God. Fear, 
he says, "is the star of hope in our dark 



90 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

horizon. Fear is what we need, as the ship 
needs wind on a rocking sea, after a storm, to 
prevent foundering. When our fears and our 
efforts shall correspond with our danger, the 
danger is past." 

When the soldier of Christ fears contest, 
fears hardship of battle, fears what people will 
say, more than he fears disloyalty to truth and 
disobedience to God, then his vision becomes 
dim and his spirit servile. He ceases to be a 
soldier of Jesus Christ. He has become merely 
an ornament to gace the chariot of victory of 
the god of this world. 

Truth is a living and vital thing, upon 
which depends daily the health and virility of 
the human soul. "The word of God is living, 
and active, and sharper than any two-edged 
sword," saith the scripture. He who would 
be a minster of the truth that makes free, must 
be ever in a state of intellectual and spiritual 
preparedness. He must welcome the daily 
challenge of God's higher way which is forever 
in mortal combat with man's lower thought 
and way. This conflict is none the less real 
because it is waged in love. 

There came to my desk yesterday a new 
book by Dr. Jefferson. The first sentence of 
the introduction by President Herbert Welch 
reads, "The world is poor because it has too 
few prophets." Mr. Jefferson is a very persist- 
ent, and, to some people, troublesome prophet 
of international peace. I do not yet find my- 
self able to agree with him in some of his con- 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 91 

elusions. But of his mental sanity and heart 
purity I can have no doubt. And surely his 
reasoning does powerfully grip the intellect, 
and his flaming passion for the vision that God 
has shown him does compel my profound re- 
spect. Whether he is nearer to the truth, or 
whether I am, at those points at which we do 
not see alike, God knows. But I thank God 
for his vision, and for his efficient and passion- 
ate way of pressing it. He has gotten my at- 
tention to aspects of war and peace to which 
I was once indifferent. 

The brave challenge of the thought and 
spirit of the church is a daily necessity, if the 
institution is to be kept in health and vitality. 

Much of the sin of our churches lies in the 
unwillingness to be troubled with any aspects 
of truth that do not minister to immediate 
comfort and self gratulation. The test of 
truth is not to be found by asking whether 
it makes some group of hearers comfortable; 
but rather, does it impart the health of spirit- 
ual sincerity and life? 

Much of the weakness and sin of our 
ministers lies in the effort, for the sake of 
peace and a job, to speak to the people before 
them that which these people like to hear< 
Following this easy course, the minister soon 
becomes himself ignorant of all truth and view- 
point except one, and that one very limited. 
And the narrower his experience and view- 
point, the greater the resentment of his wound- 
ed pride when one suggests to him that there 



92 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

are other fields of knowledge and experience 
into which he should strive to enter. 

Democracy must have leadership — moral 
and spiritual leadership — or it must perish by 
falling back upon autocracy. And demo- 
cratic leadership can rest only with those per- 
sonalities, and those groups of persons, who 
have the disciplined power and grace to stand 
up in the open, and discuss public questions be- 
fore the people, and challenge the easy-looking 
methods that are not the ways of God. 

The lawyers are our most influential 
group today, because they get the daily dis- 
cipline of contest and open challenge and 
struggle man with man. My ministerial 
brethren, upon whom rests the leadership of 
democracy, have fallen into bondage — O how 
many of them! — into bondage to the god of 
this world who orders them to speak safe and 
pleasing things. They can take the words of 
Jesus, "woe unto you when all men speak well 
of you," and preach upon them in so safe a 
manner as never to call forth any word but 
praise from any hearer, — because the battle 
of ideas and ideals is not in their churches, 
but in the 'magazines and in the dinner-pail 
circle at the packing house and in the labor 
union halls. 

The British Isles have been for centuries 
the most powerful spot of earth, because for a 
thousand years a dozen virile tribes have there 
fought one another to a standstill, first, in 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 93 

physical contest, and, since then, in intellectual 
and spiritual contest all the time. They are 
always in practice. Therefore, liberty and 
literature and religion have there reached their 
highest. 

What a contemptible little isle of weak- 
ness and self-righteousness it would have 
been, if every time any party or tribe had 
gotten a temporary political majority, it had 
pushed all others off into the sea, and thus 
tried to save its purity and good name! 

There is a fine irony and scorn in a recent 
article from the pen of Wilfred Grenfel, just 
after he had returned to America from the 
trenches in France. He tells of a class of boys 
in a Sunday School in Cambridge, which, being 
asked what is the Golden Rule, replied, "Safety 
first." 

The influence of the socially and financial- 
ly "successful" is very strong in our leading 
churches. An important part of the code of 
conduct of social and financial "success" is 
the avoidance of unpleasant facts and prob- 
lems, excepting, of course, business facts that 
must be met squarely to avoid disaster. 

Brethren, there are spiritual and social and 
industrial facts and problems that must be 
met squarely, if men are to avoid personal 
spiritual disaster, and if society is to avoid in- 
dustrial revolution. The minister of Jesus 
Christ must speak in such way as to ring true 
to the deeper sense of all sorts and conditions 



94 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

of men. He simply cannot do this unless he is 
the servant of the God of all the people. 

Recently some one twitted a member of 
an old Sioux City church with the "aristo- 
cratic" spirit of the institution. The woman 
so addressed retorted, "I want you to under- 
stand that I like to be called aristocratic." 
The minister is expected to serve this aristo- 
cratic organization. The husbands of these 
aristocratic ladies expect their employes to 
obey orders. And the minister submits, for 
the sake of a dishonorable peace, to be the em- 
ploye of these men instead of a messenger of 
Jesus Christ. 

The mission of big business and polite 
society in the Church of Christ is not to teach 
the minister the path of least resistance to- 
ward "success." These should come into the 
church to learn from the minister those ways 
of God that are very often regarded by success- 
ful men and society women as foolishness. The 
minister must be able to teach successful men 
and society women the ways of Jesus of 
Nazareth. If he has not the experience and 
courage for this task, then he becomes merely 
the hired agent of a personally conducted 
social club. He may flatter himself and his 
hearers by calling this club a church. But 
the Christ is not in it. 

The present fact, my dear brethren, is 
that in the church almost anything will pass 
muster if only the preacher is "tactful" and 
eloquent. But among the great unchurched 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 95 

masses the preacher must ring true to great 
verities, or he feels the piercing condemnation 
of a thousand eyes. Would that every preacher 
had a cultivated sense for hearing the firm 
notes of the voice of The Man who did not 
hesitate to speak plainly, "thou hypocrite. " 

Much of the society that occupies places 
of influence in our leading churches is accus- 
tomed to seek human companionships for the 
sake of comfort and pleasure. Phillips Brooks 
tells us that "he has mistaken the first idea of 
human companionship who seeks human com- 
panionships, friendships, and contacts with 
mankind directly and simply for the pleasure 
they will give him." 

A Christian man does not avoid those peo- 
ple who cost him his ease and convenience and 
comfort. I fear the business man and the 
society woman who exercise so large an in- 
fluence in our leading churches today would 
scarcely consider it in the line of his or her 
religious activities to wrestle mentally and 
spiritually, perhaps in the deep reality of 
agonizing prayer, with some man or woman 
whose spirit is sore with bitterness and ill- 
will, or deformed with selfishness, or reeking 
with intemperance. I fear these cases would 
be considered matters for the police power or 
the professional charities worker. He could 
give a little money, or make a cross on a ballot 
for another law on the statute books, and call 
these his Christian service. But were these the 
acts that made Jesus of Nazareth a Christian? 



96 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

Are these the acts that make men and women 
the saviours of mankind? Are these the acts 
that make a human soul to know that "virtue 
has gone out of him?" Are these the acts that 
train a human soul for the fellowship of the 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? for 
the service and obedience of the God of all the 
people? 

Brethren, I am persuaded that the min- 
ister who is to furnish his share of the real 
moral and spiritual leadership that can build 
and save democracy, is very sure to find him- 
self daily in those straits of experience where 
he cannot stand at all unless it be in the power 
of God. He will know very often that he has 
been kept from falling only because he "stood 
erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed." He 
will come to understand why so many men of 
the Bible, speaking out of the warm depths 
of the soul, called God "our saviour." 

Many a time have I seen ministers and 
church people dismiss one who disagrees with 
them, with the simple charge that the man's 
morals and vision had been corrupted by as- 
sociation with the people outside the church. 
Then the minister or church man retreats 
"within the shelter of the fold" to keep his 
tender morals pure, as he thinks, but in reality 
to protect his provincial ideas and experience 
which cannot survive the shock of the wide 
world where the God and Father of all the 
people walks with his own. 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 97 

O men, brother ministers ! was the spirit- 
ual life of the Son of Man so frail a plant that 
it became corrupted by contacts with all sorts 
of folks? Tell me, why should true men care 
for a religion that does not grow robust and 
pure and vigorous by knowledge and experi- 
ence of the human mind and heart? 

If democracy is to continue to exist at all, 
then democracy must be educated. And that 
education must be, centrally, moral and spirit- 
ual education. This education can be accom- 
plished only through the intellectual and moral 
battles that are fought out in the open where 
all men may see, and by seeing may be taught 
to think and judge. 

That education of democracy can be car- 
ried on only by men who are trained to stand 
in the open clash of mind and spirit, permitting 
themselves, if occasion requires, to become 
God's storm centers to clarify the atmosphere 
of thought and purify the atmosphere of spirit. 
Democratic religious organizations must be 
saved by those fellowships of brave souls who 
think and walk in the light. 

Men can be trained to stand in the open 
clash of mind and spirit, only by actually do- 
ing this thing whenever the still, small Voice 
gives the command. Veterans are made by 
actual service, and in no other way. 

And men come to know the still, small 
Voice only by habitual and swift obedience. 
The verv meat and drink of the Son of Man 



98 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

was "to do His will." The apostolic challenge 
to the material and physical threats of the god 
of this world was, "We must obey God rather 
than men." 

My friends, the very scepticism that exists 
so generally today regarding the possibility 
of a man speaking for God at all, is due to the 
dullness of our spiritual senses through disuse. 
By slow obedience our ears become dull. By 
disobedience they grow perverse. 

"God will not have his work made mani- 
fest by cowards/' says Mr. Emerson. That 
man who is slow or cowardly or compromising 
in his obedience to the voice of God's higher 
thought and way, not only loses the power to 
do the deed with efficiency; he loses the facil- 
ity of hearing; his talent of hearing God's 
voice is taken away from him. 

Our central difficulty to day is not that 
we have too much material prosperity, but 
rather that so many of our so-called religious 
leaders— the ministers and Y. M. C. A. secre- 
taries and presidents of Christian colleges — 
worship at the footstool of the god of this 
world as embodied in the persons of the 
wealthy contributors to these institutions. It 
is not less wealth that we need; but more of 
the power of the living God felt and exer- 
cised by those who hold positions that call for 
the real moral and spiritual leadership of de- 
mocracy. 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 99 

At a church convention a few weeks ago 
I listened to a typical missionary address. The 
speaker was applauded frequently. But the 
applause was only for those climaxes where 
the speaker dramatically reported the giving 
of "five thousand dollars to missions/' or some 
other large amount. There was nowhere in 
the address any suggestion of anything that 
Jesus or his disciples were to do for the 
heathen, or for the people of the city in which 
we were meeting, except that the heathen 
might "hear the name of Jesus." 

I think I could not justly be charged with 
indifference to missions. The church which I 
last served contributed to foreign missions in 
four years of my pastorate more than half as 
much as in the preceding twenty years. But 
when missions — or the church — become mere- 
ly a conventional sort of sacred machine to be 
kept in motion with money, and to occupy the 
spare time of persons to whom both the vital 
touch of God and the jarring contacts of the 
people are alike distasteful, then the control 
of the church has passed into the hands of the 
god of this world, and the voice of the living 
God of all the people has grown dim and his 
presence doubtful. 

Then the state and national officials of 
the church cease to be creative powers for the 
inspiration and discipline and spiritual sup- 
port of an influential ministry. They become 
agents of the machine, oilers of machinery, 
ready to sacrifice the ministry, ready to sacri- 



ioo GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

fice anything, to save a piece of church ma- 
chinery, or to save a wealthy contributor to 
the support of this machinery. Every "for- 
ward movement" becomes ultimately a strug- 
gle for the attention and support of the men 
of wealth. Whatever they tell us they want 
in the church, that we must give them. Their 
ability to give money constitutes their right- 
eousness in the sight of the agent of the in- 
stitution. But it is not this that constitutes 
righteousness in the sight of God. 

What we need is to hear the voice of the 
Son of Man, rising in clear accents above every 
other voice, and saying to us, "The religious 
institution is made for man, and not man for 
the religious institution — the church for man, 
not man for the church. " It is man the spirit- 
ual being that is sacred, and not the church 
machinery by which he is to be served. When 
we get first things first, then we shall create 
and sustain all the church machinery that we 
need for the doing of our work. Perhaps it 
would assist us greatly in our obedience to the 
scripture injunction, to buy "eye salve to 
anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see," if 
we should actually get the courage to throw 
overboard some of our useless and corrupt ma- 
chinery. 

It is not less wealth that we need. Our 
need is the voice of authority of the living God 
of love, the God of all the people, in the places 
of leadership in our church. In the sound of 
that Voice many things that now look wise 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 101 

will come to appear foolish, and new vistas of 
splendid wisdom will loom upon the horizon 
to refresh the thirsty soul of man and to renew 
the hungry heart of human society. 

In the little book, "Men and Religion," 
that was published by the "Men and Religion 
Forward Movement" in 1911, Mr. John R. 
Mott comes near to the expression of our need. 
I purchased the book at the time, and read Mr. 
Mott's address until I nearly wore out some of 
its pages. He tells us that, "We need all over 
this crass American field, with our multiplica- 
tion of organization, with our doing so much 
work by proxy, more emotional religion in the 
sense that men are mastered by the strong pas- 
sion of the love of God so that they break away 
from their prudential and calculating actions 
and express true friendship and love." 

We need to see and feel the Christ stand- 
ing so near to us that for the time he shuts out 
the whole physical world from our vision and 
makes us see and feel human souls standing in 
the presence of the living God of all human 
souls. When the living God grows dim to our 
eyes, then we see men standing only in their 
responsibility to us their human brothers. It 
is that that is troubling us today and giving us 
a wrong perspective. 

And the upshot of the matter is that 
which Dr. Beecher predicted, "If in our haste 
to be rich and mighty, we outrun our literary 
and religious institutions, they will never over- 
take us; or only come up after the battle of 



ioa GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

liberty is fought and lost, as spoils to grace the 
victory, and as resources of inexorable des- 
potism for the perpetuity of our bondage." 

Three or four years ago I had occasion to 
give some study to the church Year Book of 
the Congregational denomination of the state 
of Iowa. I found that sixty-six per cent of 
the churches had changed pastors in twelve 
months. Surely these pastors — ministers to 
speak the word of authority of the living God 
— are listening to some other voice than that 
of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. Surely they are hearing some word, 
from somewhere, that sounds louder in their 
ears than the voice of the God of all the people. 

Though there are numerous and illus- 
trious exceptions, of which I should like to 
bear glad witness, yet as a rule one can hardly 
look to these moving and uncertain figures for 
counsel and fellowship when he wants to find 
what the living God would have him do. 

It is light that is needed. These moving 
and uncertain prophets do not give the real 
reasons why they move every two or three 
years, or oftener. Perhaps occasionally they 
whisper the reason in some moment of con- 
fidential conversation, if they feel sure that 
their words will never be reported and their 
names never used. 

It is light that is needed for the health of 
individual souls and for the education and 
salvation of democracy. And if there is to be 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 103 

light, there must be men of power and ex- 
perience and grace to bring things to the light, 
and take the consequences without faltering 
or fear. Corruption and falsehood flourish in 
darkness, and breed in secret and whispered 
counsels. Suspicions and ignorance and un- 
rest grow in the shadow of the leaders who 
seek "safety first" and leave truth to shift for 
herself amid the dark jungles of multitudinous 
whisperings. 

Every church should be a fellowship of 
light, in which the promotion of the intelli- 
gence and spiritual joy of each member is the 
end sought. In such a fellowship each mem- 
ber gives himself as his best contribution to 
the happiness and spiritual prosperity of all. 

Every ministerial association should be a 
fellowship for the training of soldiers of the 
cross, leaders and servants of democracy. 
Open and honorable militancy should be its 
atmosphere and spirit. It ought not to be nec- 
essary to employ the shrewd and patient 
methods of the detective to discover the polit- 
ical and financial strings on your brethren. It 
ought to be fairly easy to discover who is your 
brother's Master. In fact, it is easy to the ex- 
perienced eye. 

I say to you unhesitatingly that the minis- 
ter must be financially independent. If he is 
not, then he is no minister of Jesus Christ. 
Jesus was financially independent. Paul was 



104 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

financially independent. The Roman Catholic 
priest is financially independent of his par- 
ishioner. 

A few years ago there appeared in one of 
our leading religious magazines an article on 
the question of ministerial freedom and in- 
dependence. It ended with the assertion, in 
substance, as follows: It may be heresy, but 
if it is, make the most of it — the time has come 
when no man can be free in the ministry unless 
he enjoys an independent income. 

I do not believe that statement. But I do 
believe with all my soul that no man can be 
a minister of Jesus Christ unless he is financial- 
ly independent. There are different ways of 
being financially independent. Eads How is 
financially independent because he possesses a 
fortune. The hobo is financially independent 
because he can beg a breakfast, or work for it, 
as the case may be. The minister of Mr. 
Rockefeller's church may be equally independ- 
ent if he serve with equal freedom and inde- 
pendence the man who contributes ten cents a 
week and the man who contributed ten dol- 
lars, and if in fact he serve both of them by 
serving his God as interpreted through his own 
sincere and free mind and conscience and 
heart. 

No church can be a church of Jesus Christ 
unless it makes its pulpit financially independ- 
ent. A church cannot make a minister finan- 
cially independent. Only God and the man's 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 105 

own heart can do that. In truth, only God in 
the man's own heart can do that. And when 
a minister whom God has made free and inde- 
pendent gets into a pulpit which the church 
has not made free, he proceeds to convert that 
pulpit into a free pulpit. There isn't money 
enough on earth to muzzle Jesus Christ, or a 
minister whom Christ has made free. Jesus 
doesn't boast much about his freedom; he just 
exercises it. 

How can a church make its pulpit finan- 
cially independent? By letting every person 
who contributes understand that his money 
gives him absolutely no influence in the af- 
fairs of the church. If he does not wish to 
contribute on those terms, let him go else- 
where. If the pulpit is in truth a free pulpit, 
the contributor will not need to be apprised of 
that fact by any printed notice, or direct word 
of mouth. He will understand it by the at- 
mosphere. 

If the rich man's wisdom and Christian 
vision give him influence, well and good. But 
money can give a man no influence with Jesus 
Christ, nor with a church where Jesus is Lord 
and Master. All praise to the man who, hav- 
ing possessions, dedicates them to the main- 
tenance of a free and independent pulpit. This 
act will be one witness to the fact that Jesus 
Christ has become his teacher. 

Ten times more than the church of Jesus 
Christ needs wealthy contributors, does she 



io6 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

need business men of experience and ability 
who are big enough to be good fellows in the 
things of intellect and spirit with an independ- 
ent minister — just peers, on the level, with no 
dark business methods nor political secrets to 
hide, and so spoil the fellowship; and with no 
financial noose to pull when the "hired man" 
fails to do his earthly master's bidding. 

How can a minister make himself free, 
and financially independent? In precisely the 
same old way in which Jesus did it. There are 
no new wrinkles in this business. Whom the 
Son shall make free, he shall be free indeed. 
If a minister is not made free by the freedom 
of the Son of God in his heart, then he is as 
certain to become the slave of the god of this 
world as an eagle with both wings paralyzed 
is sure to fall to earth. 

Money has in itself no moral quality. It 
is souls, not money, that may be tainted. He 
who expects his gift to exercise influence over 
truth and justice, would bribe a judge if he 
dared. So would he who permits gifts to in- 
fluence his message. The law for pulpit and 
pew is one and the same. It needs the indwell- 
ing power of the same Son of God to free the 
business man from the dominance of the god 
of this world as it does to free the pulpit. 

Brethren, my plea is for freedom and 
faith — the basic essentials of democracy and 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 107 

religion. I plead for the freedom that comes 
wherever the individual soul stands out in the 
light of his personal responsibility to God — 
the God of all the people, the God who claims 
other souls, just the same as he claims mine, 
for allegiance to himself. 

Our Protestant churches today are fallen 
into the ages-old error of thinking of the peo- 
ple as. responsible to men — church men — in- 
stead of to God, because the church men them- 
selves have so little experience of their own 
personal responsibility to the living God of 
all the people. 

I plead for the faith that believes in man 
because the light of the spirit of God may shine 
upon every heart — the faith that works 
through the shining light of God, in one's own 
heart, shining out to give light to souls for 
whom God strives more than we do, and before 
we do — the faith that fears not that truth will 
suffer in the open clash of opinion — the faith 
that believes that through the open clash of 
opinion the democracy can be educated to find 
its way under the broad heavens of divine prov- 
idence and the guiding star of the spirit of the 
God and Father of all the people. 

The world needs evangelists of freedom 
and faith, evangelists who work in the light, 
and by intellectual and moral and spiritual 
forces. No others have ever helped the human 
family on its pilgrimage to the Father. 



108 GOD OUR SAVIOR. 

I know men who see these truths dimly 
when they hear some one else state them, but 
who themselves fall back into the old ruts and 
routine, because they have lacked the courage 
to trust their faltering steps on the paths of 
the beckonings of the Spirit. 

I know men who can state these truths ad- 
mirably at times, but who have in them not 
enough evangelistic fire to get from their hear- 
ers any response except the conventional 
praise for an eloquent effort — not enough fire 
to set their intellectual fuel ablaze to produce 
power and motion. 

I am chiefly preaching to myself as I 
write — nay, rather letting the Man of Nazar- 
eth preach to me. 

If these words seem to you to be true, then 
they are God's truth, not mine. No man ever 
made any truth. Man is nothing unless he be 
a see-er of truth. If I have seen and spoken 
truth, then I am content. I leave you with 
God and the truth. 

If these words be true, and you have mere- 
ly read and assented, that is not enough; that 
will be of no avail, for you have not really 
heard them yet. The truth will be of no avail 
to save you, nor to save human society, until 
you have heard and felt it from the lips of the 
Son of Man as he suffers for the blindness of 



GOD OUR SAVIOR. 109 

the human heart, loving more the more he 
suffers, pleading with his heart's blood in order 
that you may be moved to desire to see. 

No words of sectarian theology am I 
speaking. My words are just as intelligible 
to a Jew as to a gentile; just as understandable 
by an Abraham Lincoln outside the church 
as by a Phillips Brooks within it. The experi- 
ences of the Christ are the universal words 
of all sincere human experience. His God is 
the Father of light, the God of love, the God 
and Father of all the people. 



110 



"It is not much in the nature of man to be driven to any- 
thing; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively 
his own business." — Abraham Lincoln. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 
* * * are endowed by their Creator with certain inalien- 
able rights; * * * That to secure these rights govern- 
ments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers 
from the consent of the governed; that when any form of 
government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right 
of the people to alter or to abolish it. * * *" — From the 
American Declaration of Independence, 1 776. 

"* * * the end of all political association is the 
preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man, 
and these rights are liberty, property, security and resistance 
of oppression. * * * ignorance, neglect and contempt 
of human rights are the sole cause of public misfortune and 
corruptions of government." — From the Declaration of Rights 
of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France, 
1 789. [Belief in the truths of these Declarations brought six 
bloody years of revolution in America and six yet more bloody 
years in France. — W. M. S.] 



'•There is no such thing as personal liberty in a democracy 
like ours." — From a prohibition speech by Dr. Chas. Stelzle in 
Minneapolis, September, 1915. 

"In the first place there are no such things as inalienable 
human rights. * * * This phrase is really no more than 
a bit of outworn rhetoric left over from the French Revolution." 

— Burks: Health and the School, pp. 243, 245. — A book for 
the instruction of the teachers in our public schools. 

"There are two chief concerns in civil government: First, 
to promote morality, and, second, to suppress immorality." — 
E. F. Ritter: Moral Law and Civil Law Parts of the Same Thing 
— p. 141. [A book indorsed by a prominent State Superin- 
tendent of the Anti-Saloon League as the best exposition of 
the prohibitionist theory of government. — W. M. S. ] 



TEMPERANCE AND AMERICAN 
IDEALS.* 

For a period of a hundred years the cause 
of temperance has occupied a leading place in 
the thought and effort of the American people. 
In 1813 the Society for Suppression of Intem- 
perance was organized in Maine. In 1826 the 
Society for the Promotion of Temperance was 
founded. 

These two phrases — "suppression of in- 
temperance/' and "promotion of temperance" 
— seem to stand as the adequate descriptions 
of two types of effort. These may appear to 
differ from one another but little at the start, 
being distinguished merely by a slight differ- 
ence of emphasis. "Suppression" is the key 
word of the first type, and it directs the mind 
to intemperance as something to be eradicated. 
"Temperance" is the key word of the second 
type, and it directs the thought to a positive 
quality of character as a manly power to be 
cultivated. 

But while these two types of effort may 
appear at the start to differ from one another 
only by the thin space of a slight variance of 
emphasis, yet in practice they seem always to 



*With the exception of the two or three paragraphs in 
which I appeal to Congregational church men, this chapter 
is the temperance lecture which I have given in a number of 
cities during the past year, and which in many instances was 
reported quite fully in the newspapers of the towns where I 
spoke.— W. M. S. 



H2 TEMPERANCE AND 

drift rapidly apart, as if there were concealed 
about them some inner principle of antago- 
nism that does not manifest itself to the merely 
surface understanding". This inherent con- 
flict between the "suppression of intemper- 
ance" and the "promotion of temperance" 
made itself clearly manifest quite early in the 
last century. 

On February 22, 1842, Abraham Lincoln 
gave an address at Springfield, 111., on "Char- 
ity in Temperance Reform," before the Wash- 
ingtonian Society. In this address Mr. Lin- 
coln, with that well-nigh unerring clearness of 
insight born of his broad humanity, drew the 
contrasts between these two methods. The 
suppressionists he designates as "the old- 
school champions." The people who trust 
rather to moral forces, chief among these being 
the Washingtonians, he calls "this new class 
of champions." 

Mr. Lincoln begins his address with this 
sentence, "Although the temperance cause has 
been in progress for near twenty years, it is 
apparent to all that it is just now being 
crowned with a degree of success hitherto un- 
paralleled." 

In this opening statement Mr. Lincoln is 
entirely correct. The efforts for the promo- 
tion of temperance by moral suasion had been 
in operation since 1826, reaching their climax 
perhaps by 1838, and continuing for a time 
after that date. These efforts had been re- 
markably successful. In the State of Maine, 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 113 

for instance, the quantity of ardent spirits con- 
sumed had been reduced two-thirds in three 
years. No such reduction as this has been ac- 
complished at any other time, or by any other 
method, in the history of our country. 

The third paragraph of Mr. Lincoln's ad- 
dress reads as follows: "For this new and 
splendid success we heartily rejoice. That 
that success is so much greater now than here- 
tofore is doubtless owing to rational causes; 
and if we would have it continue, we shall do 
well to inquire what those causes are." 

Then immediately Mr. Lincoln turns his 
attention to "the old-school champions," the 
people who placed the main emphasis upon 
"suppression," and who were already commit- 
ted to the policy of prohibition. He says, "The 
warfare heretofore waged against the demon 
intemperance has somehow or other been er- 
roneous. Either the champions engaged or 
the tactics they adopted have not been the 
most proper." 

Throughout the address he occupies about 
one-half his time in showing how both the 
champions engaged and the tactics adopted by 
the suppressionists were not the most proper. 
The other half of his time is given to eluci- 
dating and commending the methods of moral 
suasion for the promotion of temperance. 

He says the suppressionists "for the most 
part have been preachers, lawyers, and hired 
agents. * * * The preacher, it is said, ad- 
vocates temperance because he is a fanatic, and 



ii4 TEMPERANCE AND 

desires a union of the church and state; the 
lawyer from his pride and vanity of hearing 
himself speak; and the hired agent for his sal- 
ary." 

Gradually, through the patient observa- 
tion and experience of twenty years in the min- 
istry, the conviction has grown upon me that 
Mr. Lincoln weighed his words with care be- 
fore he wrote these sentences, and that we shall 
do well to consider them soberly. Let us look 
briefly at the three groups into which he di- 
vides those champions who lay the first em- 
phasis upon suppression by processes of legal 
enactment and physical force. 

Is it true that they desire a union of 
church and state? For answer let us turn to a 
book published in 1896 by Mr. Eli F. Ritter, an 
attorney of Indianapolis, entitled, "Moral Law 
and Civil Law Parts of the Same Thing." The 
book is worthy of consideration only because 
it has been recommended by a prominent State 
Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, as 
the best exposition of the prohibitionist theory 
of government. The title of the book furnishes 
the key to its line of argument. Its contention 
is, that civil government should aim to enact 
so far as possible all the moral laws of God into 
statute laws, and enforce them upon the people 
by the police power. Mr. Ritter declares that 
"there are two chief concerns in civil govern- 
ment: First, to promote morality, and, sec- 
ond, to suppress immorality." (Page 141). In 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 115 

other words, the political party in power is to 
decide what the moral laws of God are, and en- 
force them upon the people by the police 
power. I cannot take time here to show how 
widely this idea differs from the true American 
theory of government. If Mr. Ritter's theory 
is not the union of church and state, then I 
should like some man to tell me what would be 
the union of church and state. 

Mr. Ritter does not stand alone in his 
theories of government. On the last Sunday 
evening of September, 1915, the Rev. Charles 
Stelzle, surely one of the foremost representa- 
tives of the Protestant church in America, 
speaking for prohibition in Minneapolis, said, 
as reported next day in the Minneapolis Jour- 
nal, "There is no such thing as personal liberty 
in a democracy like ours." The next morning 
I heard Mr. Stelzle repeat this assertion before 
a hundred Minneapolis ministers. 

A teacher of the Sioux City public schools 
called my attention recently to a book, from 
our public library, which all teachers are ex- 
pected to read. The book declares that, "In 
the first place, there are no such things as in- 
alienable human rights. * * * This phrase 
is really no more than a bit of outworn rhet- 
oric left over from the French Revolution. " 
("Health and the School," by Burks, pages 343 
and 345.) 

These easy theories of the inerrancy and 
divine right of the political party in power 
sound quite different from the American Dec- 



n6 TEMPERANCE AND 

laration of Independence in which we read that 
men "are endowed by their Creator with cer- 
tain unalienable rights; that among these are 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The 
appeal to Almighty God in defense of inalien- 
able rights is not consistent with the assertion 
that there are no such things as inalienable 
human rights. 

It is not my purpose today to try to per- 
suade this representative body of churchmen 
that one of these theories is right and the other 
wrong. I desire merely to raise the question, 
whether any religious denomination can very 
well afford to decree that no man may be a 
minister of the Gospel of the Son of God unless 
he accepts without question the theory which 
finds it necessary to declare that the central 
appeal of the Declaration of Independence "is 
really no more than a bit of outworn rhetoric." 

We need not pause long with the second 
group of prohibition champions of whom Mr. 
Lincoln speaks, viz.: that sort of lawyer who 
talks "from his pride and vanity of hearing 
himself speak." But it does seem little short of 
marvelous to some of us that seventy-five 
years ago Mr. Lincoln should have described 
so aptly a rather conspicuous group of political 
adventurers in American life who are ready to 
deliver the talk in behalf of any social panacea 
that will for the moment draw the applause of 
the crowd. Mr. Bryan, even as late as the date 
of his third campaign for the presidency, was 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 117 

calling the attention of the people to his long 
years of opposition to prohibition, and reiterat- 
ing his reasons for still opposing it. I am not 
here attempting primarily to prove that Mr. 
Bryan is wrong now. I wish merely to call at- 
tention to the fact that Mr. Bryan, as late as 
his third candidacy for the highest office of 
responsibility in the gift of the American peo- 
ple, had not yet discovered any fundamental 
principles underneath this great question. 
Have we any reason to feel certain that he has 
yet discovered any fundamental principles up- 
on which to base his reasoning? Some men 
are so constituted that the applause of an au- 
dience always sounds to them like the voice of 
God. 

Dr. Lyman Abbott in his published vol- 
ume, "The Rights of Man," describes four 
types of leaders who add to the perils of de- 
mocracy. He calls them "the demagogue," 
"the boss," "the plutocrat," and "the medicine- 
man." He says: 

"The fourth leader who adds to our perils 
I call the 'medicine-man.' I will not call him 
'quack/ because this would involve too great 
obloquy; nor 'Professional reformer,' because 
this pays to him too great deference. I call 
him medicine-man because he thinks there is 
one medicine which will cure all the ills to 
which humanity is subject. * * * He is 
generally morally honest, but intellectually 
narrow; he is not a hypocrite, but he is apt to 
be a Pharisee, with a strong sense of T am ho]- 



n8 TEMPERANCE AND 

ier than thou' pervading his dogmatic utter- 
ances * * * Unfortunately, there are many 
good men in America who cannot be influenced 
by the demagogue — their moral sense resents 
his appeals to popular prejudices; nor led by 
the boss — they are too independent; nor pur- 
chased by the plutocrat — they are too honest 
— who are swayed by the medicine-man be- 
cause he appeals to their conscience; and their 
conscience is not very intelligent." 

In my judgment, the usefulness of the 
church to our modern society depends upon its 
ability to produce and to tolerate men who can- 
not be swayed by the medicine-man. I believe 
the greatest present need of democracy and 
religion is men who can find and trust the deep 
under-girding principles of freedom and faith ; 
men who in the midst of the crowd can keep, 
with perfect sweetness, the independence of 
solitude ; men who amid the drifts and tides of 
ephemeral opinion can stand, "and having 
done all, to stand." 

When we turn to the third group in Mr. 
Lincoln's classification of prohibition cham- 
pions — the man who works as "the hired agent 
for his salary," we are brought face to face 
with a situation which surely can never bear 
the light of intelligent American public opin- 
ion. 

We find today, covering the whole coun- 
try, a compactly organized army of men who 
were once ordained to the Protestant ministry, 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 119 

and who have quit their ministry, and are now 
engaged as superintendents of the Anti-Saloon 
League at salaries greater than they would re- 
ceive in the ministry, and at a kind of work 
which one of them said to me, "is a great relief 
from the pastoral cares of the ministry and the 
necessity of preparing two sermons every Sun- 
day, whereas now I have but one speech which 
does for every occasion." 

Their program varies slightly in different 
states, but is in general the same. These hired 
agents are active among the churches 365 days 
in the year, working up sentiment by which 
pressure is brought to bear largely upon rural 
legislators who very little realize the results of 
what they are doing. When the pressure be- 
comes sufficient, these legislative agents of the 
Anti-Saloon League get laws written into the 
statute books which make it possible in every 
city of the state to carry on a constant system 
of legalized blackmail. 

In the city in which I live the superintend- 
ent and the attorney of this so-called temper- 
ance organization spend their time largely in 
starting actions against people who are sup- 
posed to be disregarding some one of these 
many laws. Frequently they employ men as 
"spotters" who are willing to pick up a few 
dollars at the rate, as recently reported in the 
public press, of $2.00 for each case they can dis- 
cover; or as again recently reported in the pub- 
lic press, at $15.00 per week for catching as 
many as they can. Then the law allows to these 



120 TEMPERANCE AND 

attorneys and superintendents for each of 
these cases a fee that varies in the different 
states. The lowest fee that I have heard of 
is $25.00. It is reported on apparently good 
authority that the fees are as high as $100.00 
in some states. Throughout the year these 
cases are coming singly, and in groups of ten 
or twenty or even more. 

With the leverage of these foolish and in- 
iquitous laws all sorts of cases may be started 
with no further purpose than that of settling 
them out of court on the payment of such fees 
as may be agreed upon. Thus we have built 
up a condition in which a small army of spies 
and attorneys and superintendents may fasten 
themselves like leeches upon the public, may 
domineer over state legislatures and city police 
departments, and even though despised by all 
intelligent and right thinking citizens, may 
make a better living than they have heretofore 
been able to make at any other occupation. It is 
the same condition, now grown vastly worse, 
that Mr. Lincoln described as "the preacher/' 
who "advocates temperance because he is a 
fanatic, and desires a union of the church and 
state; the lawyer from his pride and vanity of 
hearing himself speak; and the hired agent for 
his salary/' r 

If anyone feels that I am overdrawing the 
picture, let him read in the ATLANTIC 
MONTHLY for April of the present year the 
article, "Government and Prohibition/ , by 
John Koren who is probably the best-informed 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 121 

student of temperance legislation the world 
over whom America has produced. May I read 
one paragraph from Mr. Koren's article: 

"The Anti-Saloon League is thus a very 
compact, practically self-perpetuating, and, in 
a public sense, irresponsible group, which 
knows no political fealty to other principles 
than that of prohibition, but seeks to bind all 
parties to its chariot. The corps of profession- 
al workers employed in every state is not 
amenable to local discipline or control. Its 
lack of public responsibility apparently covers 
the expenditure of vast sums of money — one 
and a quarter millions per annum is admitted 
— contributed by churches, individuals, and 
corporations for political purposes, which are 
not regularly accounted for as such. It is this 
organization, backed by its own professional 
publications and dominating no small portion 
of the general press, which, under the emblem 
of religion, has obtained control of the propa- 
ganda for state and national prohibition." 

And this, my brethren, is not all. The 
Anti-Saloon League is but one (the strongest 
on.e) of a group of organizations that are trust- 
ing to the law, and not the gospel, to regener- 
ate human society. These organizations fol- 
low in the main the same methods. They are 
directed and controlled almost wholly (wholly, 
so far as I have been able to discover) by men 
who have quit the ministry for this legalizing 
work. They dominate the churches of this 
part of the country almost completely. I can- 



122 TEMPERANCE AND 

not speak from personal knowledge regarding 
other parts of the country. In my judgment, 
they are the sign and in part the cause of the 
decadence of the power of the pulpit, and they 
are sapping the spiritual and inspirational life 
of our churches. 

One Monday morning last summer there 
called upon me a minister whom I have known 
for many years. He was then pastor of a 
church in one of the larger cities of a neighbor- 
ing state. He surprised me with the informa- 
tion that he was quitting the ministry in order 
to become district superintendent of another 
of the several national leagues that are work- 
ing along the same lines of method as the Anti- 
Saloon League. He told me that his work was 
to visit churches, make addresses, collect 
money, and exert influence on legislators. He 
said his League worked in fellowship with all 
the other reform Leagues. He startled me 
somewhat by saying that his salary was to be 
60 per cent of all the money he could collect 
during the year from churches and private sub- 
scribers, and that the other 40 per cent was to 
be delivered to the national officers from whom 
he received his territory. He afterward con- 
firmed these statements in a letter from which 
I quote as follows: "All superintendents are 
employed on a percentage basis. It will average 
about 60 per cent. There will also be an in- 
come from the sale of books what should add 
considerably to the income in a year. I am 
certain that I will enjoy the change and feel 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 123 

confident that I can get more money out of it 
than I have ever gotten out of the pastorate." 

In the state into which my friend was 
going as district superintendent of his par- 
ticular kind of reform league, there were at 
that time seven state and district superintend- 
ents of the Anti-Saloon League, and I know 
not how many local superintendents. Neither 
do I know how many state and district and 
local superintendents there were for all the 
other reform leagues that claim the church as 
their field of operations and their obedient 
servant. All these superintendents were min- 
isters, able men of their type, strong enough to 
dominate the pulpits of the state almost com- 
pletely, but in my judgment their type is that 
of Saul before he met Jesus on the Damascus 
road. 

I would not seek to drive these men out 
of our ministry. But I shall hope always to 
hold my preaching ministry superior to these 
legalizing organizations. I shall ever claim 
the right to challenge their methods whenever 
the welfare of democracy and religion shall 
seem to make such course necessary. I shall 
ask them to walk in the light when we have 
dealings with one another. 

In regard to the tactics which the prohi- 
bitionists of that early day were employing, 
Mr. Lincoln uses these words, "Too much de- 
nunciation against dram-sellers and dram- 
drinkers was indulged in. This I think was 



I2 4 TEMPERANCE AND 

both impolitic and unjust. It was impolitic 
because it is not much in the nature of man to 
be driven to anything; still less to be driven 
about that which is exclusively his own busi- 
ness. 

"When the dram-seller and drinker were 
incessantly told — not in accents of entreaty 
and persuasion, diffidently addressed by er- 
ring man to an erring brother, but in the thun- 
dering tones of anathema and denunciation, 
that they were the authors of all the vice and 
misery and crime in the land; that they were 
the manufacturers and material of all the 
thieves and robbers and murderers that infest 
the earth, that their houses were the work- 
shops of the devil; and that their persons 
should be shunned by all the good and virtu- 
ous, as moral pestilences — I say, when they 
were told all this, and in this way, it is not 
wonderful that they were slow, very slow, to 
acknowledge the truth of such denunciation, 
and to join the ranks of their denouncers in a 
hue and cry against themselves. 

"To have expected them to do otherwise 
than they did — to have expected them not to 
meet denunciation with denunciation, crimina- 
tion with crimination, and anathema with ana- 
thema — was to expect a reversal of human na- 
ture, which is God's decree and can never be re- 
versed." 

Surely no one can read the literature or 
listen to the addresses of the so-called "tem- 
perance" workers of our day without realizing 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 1*5 

that they are doing precisely the thing which 
the prohibitionists were doing seventy-five 
years ago and which Mr. Lincoln unhesitating- 
ly condemns. 

The last step in Mr. Lincoln's indictment 
of the prohibitionists of his day is that their 
denunciations "are unjust, as well as impoli- 
tic." I undertake to say that the injustice of 
the prohibition utterances and tactics has 
grown deeper and more shameless since Mr. 
Lincoln's day. I have seen it with growing 
apprehension for many years. God in his good 
providence has led me in recent months to 
feel it also ; so that now I know it both by ob- 
servation and experience, both with the head 
and with the heart. 

When any body of reformers grow so sure 
of their own perfect knowledge and righteous- 
ness that they do not feel it necessary to com- 
prehend within the operation of the golden 
rule that half (and more than half) of the hu- 
man race that disagrees with them, then sure- 
ly something is wrong with both their heads 
and their hearts. Mr. Koren, in the Atlantic 
Monthly for April, remarks that, "The belief 
of temperance reformers that they need reckon 
only upon the opposition emanating from the 
[liquor] trade simply reveals their ignorance 
of the forces with which they have to deal. 
They would dam the stream without studying 
its origin and source. First-hand knowledge 
of the saloon and the social want it meets, they 
scorn." 



126 TEMPERANCE AND 

The Atlantic has rendered a distinguished 
service to American citizenship through the 
six articles by Mr. Koren, running from Oc- 
tober, 1915, to April, 1916. And how have the 
prohibition advocates received these articles? 
The Atlantic Monthly for February, 1916, tells 
us. It says: "John Koren is known wherever 
the liquor question is seriously studied. Re- 
peatedly employed by the United States Gov- 
ernment in investigations on both sides of the 
Atlantic, Mr. Koren is the author of the Report 
of the Committee of Fifty, and has recently 
been appointed by the President of the United 
States, member of the International Prison 
Commission. Since Mr. Koren's articles have 
been written in the interests of temperance, 
rather than of prohibition, they have been a 
mark for uncontrolled assaults by those who 
resolutely confuse the two. One prohibition 
paper, with that mixture of pert smugness and 
gross misstatement which are the despair of 
real reform, asks, under the knowing title, 'The 
Atlantic Monthly and the Booze Business/ 
whether the liquor organization 'has bought a 
controlling interest in the magazine or has it 
contracted for the space in its literary col- 
umns?' It is a melancholy fact that causes 
which, like the suppression of intemperance, 
[i. e. promotion of temperance. W. M. S.] 
call forth the sincerest and most earnest ef- 
forts that good men are capable of, are often 
tainted by the reckless misstatements and 
dirty innuendo of a baser element." 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 127 

Mr. Lincoln says, finally, regarding the 
error and injustice of the prohibition tactics 
of his day, "There is in this something so re- 
pugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold- 
blooded and feelingless, that it never did nor 
ever can enlist the enthusiasm 1 of a popular 
cause. We could not love the man who taught 
it — we could not hear him with patience. The 
heart could not throw open its portals to it, 
the generous man could not adopt it — it could 
not mix with his blood." 

But I hear someone say, "Surely now at 
last it has enlisted the enthusiasm of the peo- 
ple and become a popular cause." I readily 
yield, that it has in large areas of our country 
become popular on paper. But nowhere yet 
has it become popular in its practical workings. 
The capital city of the banner prohibition state 
should furnish a fair test. Governor Capper of 
Kansas admits, in an article printed in THE 
OUTLOOK for January of the present year, 
that 90,000 quarts of liquor are registered as 
being shipped into Topeka in one month. This 
takes no account of the large quantities that 
are carried in by individuals in suit cases, autos 
and pockets. When we remember that in pro- 
hibition territory the quantity of the bulkier 
drinks, such as beer, is greatly decreased, and 
the quantity of the more condensed and less 
bulky beverages, such as brandy and whiskey, 
is proportionately increased, and that there- 
fore the 90,000 quarts of liquor registered 
monthly at Topeka is proportionately more of 



128 TEMPERANCE AND 

whiskey and less of beer, we see at once that 
the quantity of alcohol consumed per indi- 
vidual in Topeka differs not greatly from the 
average per capita consumption throughout 
the country. 

It is surely worth while to note here the 
fact, that for the current fiscal year of the U. 
S. Government, while seven new states have 
been added to the prohibition column, the 
quantity of beer produced has decreased about 
3 per cent while the quantity of whiskey pro- 
duced has increased about 7 per cent, thus reg- 
istering a substantial increase in the produc- 
tion of alcohol for beverage consumption. 

The recent experience of the city of Des 
Moines furnishes a good illustration of the 
truth of Mr. Lincoln's saying, that the pro- 
hibition method and spirit cannot mix with the 
blood of Americanism. Four years ago the 
liberal mayor was swept out of office in a sharp 
reversal of public opinion. A year and a half 
ago Billy Sunday came to Des Moines and 
seemed to carry all before him. He left the 
city government very thoroughly Billy-Sun- 
dayized. Saloons were voted out, and enforce- 
ment of prohibition claimed for itself signal 
success. Mr. Sunday returned after a few 
months and viewed his work and pronounced 
it good. 

But at the very first chance which the elec- 
torate had for self-expression at the polls after 
Mr. Sunday's snapper of denunciation and vin- 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 129 

dictiveness had had its inning at the City Hall, 
every vestige of the Sundayized government 
was swept out of office. The more pronounced 
the candidate's liberalism, the larger his ma- 
jority. The mayor who four years before had 
been defeated was victorious at the primaries 
by a vote of more than four to one over his 
nearest rival, and by 6,000 majority in the fin- 
als. Mr. Thomas Fairweather, secretary of the 
base ball club, and arch-liberal, led all competi- 
tors for city council by large majorities both 
in primaries and finals. Even the Des Moines 
"Register and Leader" in its news columns 
cast obloquy upon the remnant of the church 
party by speaking of the contest as a battle 
being waged between the "liberals" and the 
"anti-liberals." 

It is easy for some people to dismiss the 
discussion with the bald assertion that the Des 
Moines election was nothing more nor less 
than the triumph of wickedness. Des Moines 
ought not to be so triumphantly wicked im- 
mediately after so sweeping a triumph of Billy 
Sundayism. My friends, I am persuaded that 
all thoughtful and unprejudiced minds will 
find in the Des Moines incident something 
typical of a deeper and truer American spirit. 
It will not do to harden into police regulations 
every good sentiment and emotion of the popu- 
lace. Man does have from his Creator a sphere 
of liberty. The inspirer of noble emotions, and 
the teacher of high ideals, do have a work of 
their own to do — a sphere of their own upon 



130 TEMPERANCE AND 

which the police power may not trespass. 
There is a difference between church and state. 
May not Mr. Lincoln's words, "It is not 
much in the nature of man to be driven to any- 
thing; still less to be driven about that which 
is exclusively his own business," yet be largely 
true? May not his assertion in the same ad- 
dress, that "such is man, and so must he be 
understood by those who would lead him, even 
to his own best interests," yet prove to be a 
rule of wisdom? His declaration, "To these 
new champions and this new system of tactics 
our late success is mainly owing, and to them 
we must mainly look for the final consum- 
mation," is destined to stand, I truly believe, 
as a just expression of the American method 
and spirit. 

When we seek more accurate and detailed 
information regarding the methods by which 
certain types of reformers seem so easily to get 
laws upon the statute books which the people 
do not desire to have really enforced, we enter 
a field of inquiry where leaders of religious 
and political opinion ought to study more deep- 
ly than they do. We have time merely to 
touch upon the theme now. Several good 
magazine articles have recently been written 
on the subject. I may mention, among these, 
"Government and Prohibition," by John Kor- 
en, in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY for April, 
1916; and "Law, Police and Social Problems," 
in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY for July, 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 131 

1915, by Mr. Newton D. Baker, then mayor of 
Cleveland, and now in the President's cab- 
inet. 

There is a type of reformer whose talent 
is not very great, who will work tirelessly at 
the reform business for a moderate salary, and 
be quite content, for the simple reason that 
he is getting more money and attention than 
he could command at any other business. His 
method of reasoning is of the scholastic type. 
Grant him his premises, and he can prove any- 
thing. And he assumes his premises, without 
any instinct or ability for the discernment of 
the deeper realities of human nature or the 
higher ways and thoughts of God. His argu- 
ment seems, to the casual observer and to the 
surface thinker, as plausible as the testimonials 
of an experienced patent-medicine salesman. 
And the application of his remedy is so simple 
and inexpensive that it appeals powerfully to 
the unthinking — just place a quarter in the col- 
lection box, and vote yes at the ballot box, and 
the reformer and the police will do the rest 
while the citizen sleeps or attends the card 
party. 

This reformer presents to the citizen a 
ballot that reads something like this: "Shall 
we have prostitution and gambling and drunk- 
enness in our country, or shall we not." The 
citizen must vote "yes" or "no." Now the citi- 
zen "is up against it," so to speak. If he votes 
to have prostitution and gambling and drunk- 
enness, what a terrible demon of wickedness 



132 TEMPERANCE AND 

he is; he could not get on his knees and pray 
for prostitution and gambling and drunken- 
ness in our country, but now he has gone and 
voted for them! 

It all looks so plausible ! But let this same 
reformer get control of the city government 
and go at the task of really enforcing his 
scheme of morality upon the people, and his 
regime will last only until the next election. 
This accounts for the peculiar fact, so often 
observed, that the man who gets all these 
blind and foolish laws upon the statute books 
can seldom get elected to office, and if by 
chance he does, he lasts for but a brief term. 
At the same election at which the people will 
vote to outlaw all wickedness, they will elect 
to the chief office a man who has good horse 
sense and a generous supply of the milk of 
human kindness. In doing so, the people have 
placed in office a man who is able to give them 
a clean and progressive administration; but by 
foolish and iniquitous laws the people have 
bound him with the graveclothes of mediaeval- 
ism, and have given every vindictive and quix- 
otic reformer an instrument of legality with 
which to tantalize and denounce and blackmail 
the official whom they have elected. 

I had the honor a few weeks ago to present 
such a line of thought as this, with quotations 
from Washington and Lincoln, in the course 
of a joint discussion with Dr. Dickie, who is 
reputed to be an able exponent of prohibition 
doctrines. In his rejoinder he made no attempt 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 133 

to deal with the facts or principles of the argu- 
ment, but merely waved it all aside with the 
sneering remark, that one ought to quote from 
up-to-date authorities, and not from men who 
had never talked over a telephone nor heard of 
the word "sociology." In such a method of 
discussion, I wonder what would become of 
the words of Isaiah or the teachings of Jesus. 

My friends, I am not able to believe that 
the invention of the telephone or the coinage 
of the term "sociology" has changed at all cer- 
tain basic principles of government and re- 
ligion. I am not able to think that the laws of 
God or the fundamental elements of human 
nature have been greatly changed by man's 
development of new means of physical locomo- 
tion or communication. I am not able to see 
that the change of the name or manner of gov- 
ernment from monarchy to democracy has in 
any manner affected the inalienable rights of 
man that are bestowed by his Creator. 

When a man resorts to a mere wave of 
the hand and loudness of self-assertion instead 
of the appeal to eternal wisdom and justice, 
he is placing mob force in the seat of the Al- 
mighty, and the result must ultimately be the 
unregulated riot of physical force which we 
see today in Mexico. If there are no such 
things as rights, then there is no such thing 
as right, and society is on the steep incline 
toward savagery where every man sanctifies 
his own desires and prejudices as the only 
good, and might as the only law of right. 



134 TEMPERANCE AND 

Man has never achieved nobility until he 
has challenged mere material force and the 
rule of might, whether of aristocracies or of 
democratic majorities, and has made his ap- 
peal to a justice and right that is higher than 
any sanction that can be given by any tem- 
poral power. What are rights but the preroga- 
tives and privileges and duties that a soul de- 
rives from the hand and heart of the Eternal? 
If there are no such things as rights, then there 
is no such thing as right, and if the political 
majority shall decree that a man must live in a 
cellar and feed his soul on the Koran and his 
body on cheese sandwiches and ale there is no 
appeal from the decision. 

The prejudices and passions of the so- 
called "good people" have often been great 
mischief-makers in human history. We need 
not go farther back for our illustration than 
the days of Reconstruction that followed the 
Civil War. 

The effort of Northern force and wrath 
was to make the Southern whites grant to the 
negro all rights and authority as if the negro 
were educated and experienced to rule the 
state. These Northern whites were not will- 
ing to get outside themselves far enough to 
confess that if they were in place of the South- 
ern whites they would do just as the Southern 
whites did — resist to the death the rule of 
ignorance and corruption over them. 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 135 

The Northern whites had a certain ele- 
ment of truth and right on their side. But most 
of them were not willing to think justly down 
into human nature and into the eternal prin- 
ciples of God's laws of human progress, and 
then place upon themselves a proper restraint, 
and do by their fellowmen as themselves in 
the same circumstances would have wished to 
be done by. 

Therefore the children of these Northern 
"good people" are today flocking to see "The 
Birth of a Nation," and hissing the reformers 
whom their parents approved and applauding 
the spirit of Southern resistance as illustrated 
in the Ku-Klux Klan whom their parents 
counted above all men accursed. And these 
children of our fathers are acting just as intelli- 
gently today as their fathers acted in their 
day. There were some men in the days of the 
civil war, and in the years following, who saw 
clearly the injustice and folly of the quixotic 
idealism and the unbridled vindictiveness of 
the carpet-bag reformers. These men who saw 
the deeper principles, and gave them utterance, 
are now seen to have been the true reformers. 
They were such men as Abraham Lincoln 
whose heart was pierced by the assassin's bul- 
let, and would have been more bitterly pierced 
by the taunts of the self-righteous reformers 
if he had lived, Henry Ward Beecher, Wash- 
ington Gladden, and other illustrious names. 

And the reason for these sad mistakes of 
the people who act in the name of religion and 



136 TEMPERANCE AND 

goodness is the same now as when Isaiah with 
tongue of flame cried out, "Israel doth not 
know; my people do not think." They exercise 
their brains assiduously in the effort to argue 
up their own sentiments and preferences, but 
there is no breadth of humanity and no height 
of God in their thinking. Their righteousness 
is self-righteousness. 

Recently I received a letter from an of- 
ficial of the State Conference of one of the 
leading religious sects of a neighboring state, 
in which the writer lays stress upon the value, 
in the development of the Hebrew people, of 
"the many prohibitions that hedged God's 
chosen people all through their history." Then 
on the assumption of the leading importance of 
these "many prohibitions" in the making of 
the Hebrew nation, my correspondent pro- 
ceeds to build his argument for the prohibition 
of murder, theft, false witness, adulterated 
foods, gambling, prostitution, drinking of 
wine. 

My correspondent, like the carpet-bag re- 
constructionists of fifty years ago, possesses a 
certain element of truth and right in his desire 
to lessen the evils of intemperance. But his 
reasoning has in it at least eight flaws, any 
one of which, like the broken wheel under a 
moving train, is sufficient to send his train 
into the ditch. 

(1) His assumption that the Hebrews 
were made into a nation of religious geniuses 
by prohibitions has scarcely more truth in it 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 137 

than to assume that the Brooks family or the 
Abbotts or the Beechers were made great by 
the statutes against smoking or Sunday base- 
ball. In the making of the Hebrews suppres- 
sions played but a trifling part. They were 
made by the free inspirations from the heart of 
the Eternal, as expressed in the Psalms, the 
Proverbs, the Prophets. 

(2) My correspondent calls himself a 
Christian. Yet it would seem as if he had 
never read the New Testament, nearly every 
page of which is keyed to the contrast between 
an external rightousness that is by the law, 
and a real righteousness that is from God. 
What did Paul mean by condemning "the 
righteousness of the law,'' and preaching "the 
righteousness of God?" 

(3) He classes murder, theft, etc., all of 
which are crimes of an active aggressor 
against an unwilling victim, along with gam- 
bling, etc., in all of which both parties are will- 
ing, and no unwilling party is immediately 
and directly wronged. 

Never yet in the world's history have 
merely suppressive measures succeeded in do- 
ing much to decrease this latter class of acts, 
which may be sins, but are not crimes in any 
such sense as are murder and theft. If all 
sins are to be enacted into crimes, then we 
have again the ironclad union of church and 
state which can lead nowhere but to revolu- 
tion. 



138 TEMPERANCE AND 

(4) He puts adultery and use of wine in 
the same class. Did he think when he did 
that? He knows that Jesus drank wine; that 
Jesus and the disciples drank it together at 
the last supper, and that for eighteen centuries 
the Christian church has commemorated that 
event by drinking wine. He knows that mil- 
lions of the best men have drank wine daily 
even until now. Will he confess that Jesus, 
and all these millions, did an act like unto adul- 
tery? Every honest man knows, moreover, 
that the nature of wine and alcohol changes 
not with the centuries. 

(5) My correspondent professes to be 
aiming at the evil features of the saloon. But 
he makes no distinction between the evil char- 
acter of some places where wine is sold, and 
the selling and drinking of wine in itself which 
harmed neither Jesus nor Gladstone who used 
it, and wronged nobody else. He is like the 
carpet-bagger who took no time to distinguish 
between the right of the black man to his free- 
dom, and the right of the black man then to 
rule over the intelligence and character of a 
state or to marry his white neighbor's daugh- 
ter. 

(6) When the saloon is mentioned, he 
simply stops his ears and cries out in self- 
righteous emotionalism. He is unable to con- 
sider that under our laws (sometimes wise, 
more often foolish) the saloon is the place 
where men are permitted to buy that which 
Jesus and Gladstone bought, and that also it 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 139 

is the only place in our cities where millions 
of men can meet each other for a social chat. 
One can never remedy an evil by refusing to 
reckon with facts. 

(7) He has never thought far enough to 
see that we do not "prohibit" murder at all in 
the sense in which he uses that term. If we 
did, we should restrain all men beforehand 
lest some should commit murder. In relation 
to murder, we leave all men free so long as 
they refrain from violence against their fel- 
lows, and we restrain the murderer only, thus 
making a proper distinction between the man 
who has character and the man who lacks it. 

(8) He has not yet learned the funda- 
mental truth, that laws never have affected 
much the number of murders, and never can. 
The city of Chicago has all the laws against 
murder that can possibly do any good, and yet 
she murders twenty times as many people in 
proportion to population each year as London 
and ten times as many as Paris. It is not lack 
of laws, but lack of teaching that makes the 
difference. 

Here lies the subtle wickedness of my 
brother's foolish thinking. By the easy and 
characterless method of writing a ballot he is 
trying to save himself the pains of the truth- 
ful brotherliness of the Cross of Christ. He 
ends by destroying the dignity and power of 
the teacher in home and school and church. 
He leaves the living God out of the reckoning, 
and puts man's will (his own will) into the 



140 TEMPERANCE AND 

place of God. His emphasis is chiefly on the 
responsibility of the soul to man instead of to 
God. 

His doctrine is, that there are no such 
things as individual rights. If there are no 
such things as rights, then there is no such 
thing as right; and a man has no responsibil- 
ity except to the party in power; and there is 
no authority for right except the might of 
whoever can get it. 

My brother's reasoning and doctrine is 
the most dangerous cloud today on the horizon 
of American hopes. It is making the church 
itself a great institution of godlessness and 
infidelity, trusting not in God for the fulfil- 
ment of our hopes, but looking chiefly to poli- 
tics and police. It is making "the man of God 
with power" almost an un-thought-of and un- 
heard-of factor, the teaching and spiritual min- 
istry a waning influence, and the church of 
God subservient to merely temporal forces. 
Substituting temporal might for eternal right, 
it is guiding our feet down the broad highway 
that leads to Mexican strife and perennial dis- 
order. 

My correspondent deigns no answer to my 
questions and suggestions, except to reply that 
I am crazy, and to denounce me as a champion 
of the saloon and an accomplice of the devil. 

My contention today, in the presence of 
the representatives of a great religious denom- 
ination, is not primarily that I am right. My 
contention is that the gates of the church must 



AMERICAN IDEALS. 141 

be kept open to brave challenge of question- 
able spirit and method in reform, and the re- 
ligious platform free to sincere discussion of 
issues in which good men have not yet reached 
final judgment. 

There are many men in America who are 
prepared to offer really constructive programs 
of temperance legislation. Mr. Koren does so 
in the ATLANTIC for April, 1916. But we 
are able to get no hearing for these so long as 
the voice of denunciation and unreasoning 
emotionalism drowns every word of calmer 
thoughtfulness. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



